Garden of the Bloodpotter

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Prologue

In the time of the King’s War, the towns on fertile land and brimming coastlines were taken in blood and violence and the bleakest, wickedest magics. Forests were set to burn in fires so vile in composition that long after the trees had reduced to ash, the ghosts of trees kept smoldering, consuming anything that got near in barely visible mists of burning vapor. Rivers were enchanted to turn all living creatures who touched the water into ice. The excruciating pain of the process made for riverbanks lined with crouched, contorted, frozen corpses, the wind whistling through their fractures, as if one could hear their souls trapped inside, eternally screaming. Fields of dead fighters, rotting and bloating on blighted battlefields, were crushed underfoot by every day’s new battle. A rarer sight in these killing places: alone, in the center of a perfect circle of fine dry dust, would lie the blackened body of a dead HighSoldier.

And somewhere far away, dragging its soul back from beyond, would be a Bloodpotter.

Bloodpotters were formed to raise the exalted dead, to trap and unite the most brutal soldiers’ severed souls with powerful bodies, so that they could continue to fight in the king’s endless War. They were part of the legion of War Sorcerers who created various beings that stalked the battlefields, looking for enemy soldiers or deserters to devour. But a Bloodpotter’s only duty was to his HighSoldier. It was said that without the tainted magics of War Sorcerers, the war would have been long over. Without them, the soldiers could die, and the kingdom could rest and heal. But these things were said quietly, only to trusted friends, and only in places too far away for such blasphemies to bring the fury of the king.

The sorcerers known as Bloodpotters walked beside death at whim, and left despair ever in their wake.

This is the story of what would not be left behind.

I.

She was called Hen by the villagers. This was in part because she, like the other beggar orphan children, scratched in the dirt for bugs and bits of roots to eat to stay alive. The crueler reason for the name was that those who saw her, filthy and ragged and venomous of eye, thought she’d make better stew meat than future childbearer, since she was far too tiny to grow up enough to supply sons and daughters for the War. They would smack their lips at her, wave spoons and laugh as she passed by. She spent most of her time outside the walls, beside the road, with the other beggar children.

In the village of Fauen, in those days, children born to those who already had too many children were sent outside the gates nearly as soon as they could walk. Hen did not remember being sent away. All she could remember was the road, the scratching for food, the cold nights and cruel villagers. The passing travelers, on their way to or from King’s City or the battlegrounds. The taxmen who came to take away nearly all the villagers’ crops were often enough nicer to the beggar children than the villagers were, giving them the occasional bit of food that had nearly ceased to be edible. Sometimes a traveler would motion for a beggar child to follow them, and sometimes, a child would go. They never came back. Hen always knew a traveler would take her away someday. To the places in all the stories the children told each other in their favorite fairy tales about the King’s City, the battlegrounds, the richer towns and the beautiful sea and wherever it was the taxmen wandered to.

Hen was seven years old the afternoon the red cart appeared on the horizon. She and four other child beggars, all older than her, were waiting by the road, watching the cart approach. They had learnt how to tell by an approaching dust cloud if a passerby would be a large caravan or a small one, a rich person or a poor person, a tax collector or a nobleman’s retinue with guards. This cart was different, moving quickly though it did not appear to have a mule or horse to pull it. It seemed to warp the light around it, as if there were cloud cover over it alone under the flat blue sky. The cart was accompanied by a solo traveler walking along beside it.

Hen stood when the others stood, all shading their eyes, peering hard into the distance, trying to figure out which begging style might be the most profitable. But when the others shouted in alarm and ran into the village to hide, she did not leave. She stood alone, by the side of the road, blinking grit from her eyes, waiting to see what was coming her way. Waiting to see what was pushing the cart. Waiting to see why the solo traveler looked like a pile of bloody rags on top of a stick under a sweeping gray cloak.

By the time she saw his eyes, glowing red as a smoky sunset out through the rags around his head, it was too late to run. The smell of incense pouring out of the traveler’s cart seemed to hold her by the throat. She could not tear her gaze away from his eyes. The cart and the figure approaching flowed over the dirt road as if they were sliding across midwinter ice. Hen, held rigid and still by the incense spell, pissed herself when the cart stopped beside her.

The figure paused, towering over Hen, burning away every thought in her head with his stare, with his scent. He knelt down, red eyes flaring in a mass of bandages, and asked in a low, velvety voice, if Hen was a good omen or a bad one.

She could not speak.

Show me to shelter, he said, and through his scarves his breath was more incense, sweet woods and resins, filling Hen’s head with fog and confusion, setting her heart beating too hard in her little chest. From out of an invisible seam in his gray cloak appeared a hand, large and slender and gloved in dark leather, reaching for her shoulder. She cringed away, but he rose and followed her, the red cart behind them. Desperate for help, she led the stranger and his cart past the walls, into Fauen.

II.

The village of Fauen was a bleak patch of dirt, with brown crops and brown people, brown houses and too little brown food growing in dry rows in dry fields. Still, its people counted themselves lucky, living so far from the horrors of the king’s battlefields. There was little of value in Fauen; a tainted stream, a hardy people, and mild if rain-sparse weather. The villagers reminded each other of their good fortune as they ground gritty grains to make bread, which they soaked in sour milk to make porridge. These commoners told stories to pass the time as they toiled in the grain fields. They recited battle poetry while smelting and sweating in the blacksmith hall, repairing tools and weapons for passing soldiers and taxmen in exchange for news and goods. The nobles in King’s City lived in luxury, they told each other, but they also fought a miniature version of the war in the form of politics, and these battles were just as bloody. To hear tell from passing wanderers, the King’s City held more assassins than nobles. It was also training ground for the War Sorcerers, who were rarely encouraged to practice their crafts outside the palace and utterly forbidden to venture beyond the corpse-choked battlefields.

No one who lived in Fauen had ever left, except for the lost children outside the walls, and as such no one had ever actually seen a War Sorcerer, a King’s Demon, in person. So it took some time for the villagers of Fauen to believe what they were seeing being led up their main pathway by the beggar child Hen.

Up the path they slid, Hen stumbling and shaking ahead of the regal stranger floating across the ground, head and face hidden by red headwraps. The big cart rolled steadily behind on wheels that barely seemed to turn. Stopping in their work, the villagers pulled their children behind their legs and watched the pair pass, glaring with dread, wondering who would deal with this, who would tell the blacksmiths to bring out all of their store, who would be the first to attack. Hen looked neither right nor left, only at the ground. The villagers who pitied her most hoped her death would be painless. Those who blamed her were angry that her exposure to the demon in rags would likely taint her meat and marrow, so she’d have to be wasted in a pyre.

They stopped outside the burnt-out skeletal wreck of a house that had been open to the elements for so long that green and brown fuzz grew over much of the blacked timbers. The family that had lived there succumbed to illness borne by badly filtered water from the stream, so none had suffered when the house caught fire and burnt them away. No one had gone in since, and the villagers made signs of protection across themselves as they passed. But the stranger lifted a hand and pointed to the dim shadows inside. Together, he and the girl and the cart sank into the darkness.

Almost to a man, the villagers set off for the blacksmith hall.

Hen watched them walk away, leaving her alone, and her heart sank in despair. But she obeyed when the demon-eyed stranger said, This will do, Little Omen. Go inside and clear the stones away.

His gaze seemed to burn against her back as Hen crouched over the ground, slowly picking up stones and carrying them to the back of the burnt house. There were bones and such, those of rats and other rodents and of people, too; she let them all lie. When she got up the nerve to look around, she saw the demon-eyed man in rags pulling things from his cart. She could not clearly make the items out in the dim, but it looked like jars and boxes and fabric-wrapped packages. He also took out a book, and opened it. She watched him turn a few pages of the book, an actual book, an item so rare in their part of the world that Hen forgot her stones for a moment at the sight of it. Then she caught a movement behind the red-eyed demon, past the carts. Villagers were walking past, pretending to be busy, shooting glances in at them. They all carried sharp things and heavy things, digging and chopping things. Any hope in the back of Hen’s mind that she might flee melted away.

The demon sat down in the cinder dust with his book and unwrapped one of his packages, and the scent of honeyed oatcake blocked out every other thought in Hen’s mind. Carrying stones in each hand, she wandered over.

Splashed across the open pages of the book was a map. It was in color, soft painted trees and roads and mountains, a shining gold pile of houses on the top left corner, with a crown over it, red splotches and black splotches in areas around it, an expanse of blue to the right.

Hen looked over to the red-bandaged head and saw his eyes watching her face. The scarves covered his mouth, and she just had time to wonder how he would eat while wrapped up like that when he whispered through the cloth. There is a line all around this house. No one will pass my line to come in. You will not go out.

She nodded, and the demon set the little wrapped honey cake in her hands. It was the first sweet thing she had eaten in her whole life.

The demon shut the book and tossed it back onto the cart and then lowered himself to stretch out in the dirt, hands under his head. The red glow went out as he shut his eyes. Hen licked her dirty, sticky hands and chewed on the bitter dried leaf that had been used as wrapping, tearing a bit off and swallowing that too. Outside, villagers had stopped the pretense of being busy and many were just standing there, peering in, squinting as if they could not see her. Hen crouched down in the dirt beside the demon, who had gone so still he barely seemed to be alive. She touched his gray traveling cloak and found it so soft and thick that she could not stop herself from scrubbing her little face against it. It smelled like spices, and her mind grew foggy again. She carefully pulled a little bit of the cloth away from the demon and scootched over to curl up on it, deliciously comfortable. She did not sleep, just rested with the vision of the map in her mind and the taste of honey in her mouth, watching the shuffling boots of the villagers, waiting for death.

When the boots began to approach all at once, the demon’s gloved hand appeared again, and draped itself gently over Hen’s face, over her eyes. Incense whirled her up into sleep.

III.

He was beautiful under his bandages, if incredibly alien to Hen. And so was the house he built.

The stones were cleared out, the dirt and ash swept and covered by more carpets and rugs than Hen thought could have existed in the world. Their designs were intricate and beautiful. Hen wandered around for hours, looking at them and touching them, when she had no assigned tasks to perform. Not that the tasks themselves were any less interesting. For all the unimaginable expense of his belongings, he was content to fling them this way and that, ordering Hen to tidy the piles he cast about. Omen, he’d call, peering into a silver box that was emitting green light, stack those yellow books over in that corner. Omen, set these tiles over there, make sure they are fitted together tightly, and pile some wood on for a fire. Omen, here are some lamps. Fill them with oil from this bottle here, look; do you see?

Every new task fascinated her, and kept her from thinking about the villagers outside. They all kept their distance from the house now. The morning after their first night together, she had awoken to find strange colored light all around her. The space between the skeletal burnt-black beams of the house had been covered by what looked like shiny stretched silk. Every patch was a different color, and the dawn light streamed through, washing everything in jeweled hues.

The next morning, as Hen was tidying a stack of rolled up scrolls, a man in gray clothes with a red scarf around his neck swept from behind the cart and said, Omen, gather the bones you left in the dirt yesterday and pile them up here, in this empty pillowcase.

Hen stared. His bare face looked entirely human, if a great deal smoother-skinned and wider-eyed than the villagers she was used to. She had been expecting hideousness to be the cause for the bandages, but all they had been hiding was a head full of dark curls and a face of soft features and sharp jawline. He had a melodious voice, more fashionable in accent than any taxmen or traveling merchant she’d ever encountered on the road. His hands were still covered in gloves, and the tunic and trousers did not seem to have much flesh inside to fill them out, but had his eyes not been glowing red, Hen could have believed he was the main hero character out of her favorite fairy tale, “The Five Noblemen.”

Then his red eyes flashed. Omen! Bones! Quickly now!

Hen loved his name for her. She loved her new life. She loved every task, every scrap of food he gave, even though the richness of his snacks hurt her stomach. She wondered about the beggars outside and tried to forget the villagers, their angry glares. She could see the shadows of them moving past outside, through the silks. But they felt a world away from this pillowy, perfumed place.

Every time Hen-Omen looked upon the traveler she was filled with a kind of adoration, a desperation to protect him. He tied one of his red scarves around the waist of the brown sack she wore as a dress, and another around her head to hold back her tangled hair. When he handed her a bucket and told her they were off to fetch water, she pouted, resenting the very air outside the house, that she should have to share the vision of him with the sky.

The traveler brushed aside an oiled fabric hanging over the open doorway , and they stepped out into the evening. Hen-Omen’s nose wrinkled; she’d never realized how badly the village stank before. A few folks were out, mending and washing and doing a few easy chores, but they promptly went inside their houses as soon as Hen-Omen and her master appeared. She was surprised at the lateness of the day; it almost always felt like early afternoon inside the house. They walked along in the cool, smelly air to the end of town and out of the walls. The beggar children still there leapt to their feet and ran off, but the traveler paid them no mind. They went down to the stream and filled the bucket and bottles in the box he carried.

Coming back up the road was slow going, as Hen-Omen had trouble carrying the heavy pail. The box of filled glass bottles rested under the traveler’s arm, against his hip, like he was carrying a box of feathers. Amidst all the low mud-and-thatch huts of the village, the traveler’s house looked deeply unsettling, like multicolored skin stretched over black bones. It even looked a little like it was breathing.

In the doorway of one of the villagers’ homes, Hen-Omen saw two of her beggar friends peering out. She smiled at them. They gestured signs of warding off evil.

Back in the house, Hen-Omen watched in horror as the traveler uncorked a bottle and took a mouthful of tainted water out of it. She dropped her pail in surprise, splashing her legs and the rug with some of the brownish water. But before she could shout a warning to him, he grimaced and coughed out what looked like a fat brown wriggling slug into his palm.

He wiped his mouth with the back of his other hand, and peered down at the slug. When he dropped his hand away, the slug remained in the air, pulsating and spinning slow.

Omen. Bring me the trunk that’s under the right front wheel of the cart. It has buckles on each side. Bring it here.

She watched him pull out glass vials, tiny ones, full of clear and murky liquids. Some he would sniff, some he would tap droplets from onto his pink tongue, some he would pour onto the floating slug of taint. She watched it twitch, bubble, ooze, and then crumble into dust.

He gestured to the pail at Hen-Omen’s feet. She dragged it over, and he dipped his gloved fingers into his mouth and then into the murky water and stirred; the water became clear. We’ll pour that in the stream tomorrow, he muttered, spitting on one of his carpets and wiping his mouth again. He kicked his trunk of glass vials closed. Then he trudged over to collapse into his thickest heap of carpet, to sleep.

The villagers watched as the pair crossed the town again at dawn, passed beyond the wall with a full bucket, and returned with an empty one. And when the beggar children came running up the road in the afternoon, shouting that the stream was clean, the water sweet and clear, no one believed them. The beggar boy was made to drink from it in full view of some of the skeptical villagers, but the others did not hesitate to jump in and splash around.

The water was taken to pour onto the roots of the brown stalks of grain. Within a week, they were green.

IV.

Hen-Omen awoke wrapped in the traveling cloak, on the ground next to the nest where the traveler had been sleeping last, to find all of the other four beggar children seated in front of the fire, eating sausage slices. Beside them the traveler was crouched, showing them something on a sketch of paper and giving them instructions. Jealousy seared up from her stomach, and she was on her feet in an instant. Without turning, the traveler said, Omen, unwrap and wash the cups and plates from the pack tied in rope. We have guests. Seething, Hen-Omen did as instructed, soothed only when he appeared by her side with a full sausage and a honey cake, which she ate smugly in full view of the cakeless interlopers.

While Hen-Omen swept the rugs and dusted the books, the other children were sent to fetch discarded stalks from the fields, to wash them in the stream and hang them to dry. The rough outer stalks peeled away and were worked with their fingers and some smooth-edged stones until they could be pulled into fine threads. Other stalks were twisted while soaking and when dried, became tough but malleable ropes that the beggar children used to weave into wall partitions for the house and mats for the floor. The first mats that met the traveler’s approval were spread outside, with some torn lengths of fabric, as bedding for the beggars, who were told they would be sleeping there from that day on. The second set of mats, much better than the first, created a makeshift platform, hung from the black beams close to the roof, for Hen-Omen’s sleeping space.

Competing for his time and favors, the beggar children began to dislike and mistreat each other. But more than this, they disdained the townsfolk, who still gave their generous and beautiful new master a wide berth, even as the spring ran clear, even as the green stalks produced the plumpest grains any of them had ever seen, even as the goats’ milk lost all of the sourness and the goats grew fat and playful. No matter what he did for them all, they answered with discourtesy and rebuff.

Hen-Omen hated her nest at first, so far away from where she wanted to curl up like a kitten inches away from her master every time he took a rest. He had piles of pillows all over the house, bright-colored and softer than anything, and Hen-Omen would lie just to the side of whichever he occupied. She was never invited into the pile, and the construction of the nest had begun the day after she had tried to climb up and snuggle with him for the first time. He’d turned from her, and she’d slid back down to the rug and blinked away tears. But when the nest was finished, sturdy and cozy in the rafters, the beggar children were sent to fill it with a few pillows and bright linens, as Hen-Omen watched. And as a final donation, the traveler ascended the ladder himself, and spread out his own gray cloak across it, like a blanket.

It was a promise, she decided to herself. He had traveled all this way to find her. His traveling cloak was now shared between them because if he ever left, she would go with him.

Soon the woven walls were up, reinforced with mud painted in the same swirling designs of the rugs. The hearth was merry with a cooking fire, and makeshift shelves stood against the beams, holding jars and potions. There were new bits of furniture every day. The traveler’s house began to feel like a palace, its nobles the beggar children themselves. Sometimes in awe of their luck, the beggar children would sit together and share a spiced stuffed bun and talk about their fortune, remembering the dusty road outside the walls, the misery that had been life. Finally free of starvation and cold, they began to make an effort to be kinder and more generous with each other again, as they had in their previous life outside the wall. Hen-Omen tried to accept that the traveler did not belong to her alone, and the others tried to accept that she was his favorite. As long as she took care of them, they would watch out for her.

The traveler seemed to neither encourage nor discourage this, only gave out orders and bits of rich food, and otherwise ignored the lot of them. But one day the other beggar children came in early from collecting stalks, carrying one older child who had long ago been nicknamed General. This was because he was the eldest and had looked after the others outside the gates, who the villagers called his little troops. He meant a great deal to them, so when he was dragged into the house covered in blood with his forearm nearly chopped in half, Hen-Omen did not hesitate to rouse their master from his dusktime nap.

The traveler wiped the sleep from his eyes and stared down at General, who was breathing high and unsteady, lying across the low dining table, bleeding into the weave of the surface. The traveler banished everyone from the house except Hen-Omen.

The traveler sat down on the mat beside the table, leant forward, and ran his tongue through the wound in the boy’s arm. He sat back up, licked his lips thoughtfully. His eyes dimmed darker than she had ever seen them, the color of the old bronze weapons past travelers had repaired in the blacksmith hall. Hen-Omen watched horrified, flinching when he turned to her, lips red, and ordered her to fetch him the pale leather box from the back room. Then he sent Hen-Omen to the stream, for water.

She ran as fast as she could, filled a little leather bladder in the stream, and raced home again, giving the worried beggar children on the mats outside the door a bracing nod. She carried the water over to the table and set it down, heart catching at the sight of General’s graying face. Beneath his body, the table was completely clean of blood, as was the ragged wound across his forearm.

The traveler pulled her down beside him, then took a handful of her hair and pushed her head down until her eyes were inches away from the wound. He traced a clean-gloved finger along the split skin and pointed out the layers inside. He named them, and she repeated the names, until she, breathing hard and stuffing down the desire to be sick, achieved the proper pronunciation and tone. Satisfied, the traveler released her hair and showed her the peek of bone, the curdles of fat, the changing textures of the flesh. He spoke with the deliberate patience of a being unconcerned with the possible death of the child on his table, and asked after each explanation if Hen-Omen understood the last thing he said. Then, just as General’s eyelids stopped fluttering and his head began to sink to the side, the traveler selected a bottle from under the table, upended the clear contents over the gash, pulled a needle and thread out of his tunic, and made Hen-Omen watch him sew the lips of the wound together.

Take him outside.

The beggar children sat all around General as he slept afterward on the mats outside the house. Hen-Omen put a smuggled pillow under his head, and held his hand. One of the villagers approached the group hesitantly. He held a steaming bowl of porridge, offering it to them, his machete in its sheath on his belt. The other beggar children glared at him as he approached, and Hen-Omen surmised that he had been the one to chop General’s arm to the bone, working in the field. He knelt down and set the bowl on their mat, just to the side of where General lay, then gasped and reached for the boy’s arm. He brushed his finger across the dark threads of the traveler’s stitching, and the thread crumbled away, revealing a pink and shiny scar, the wound healed.

The villager backed away, his eyes wide, accidentally kicking General, who scrunched his face up and grunted for water. Bodysmith, the village man said, making evil-repelling gestures. That thing in there is a Bloodpotter. Be careful, children. War sorcerers have only ill tidings.

None of them did leave, and when a perfectly healthy General showed off his scar to the other workers in the grain fields, they began to bring their own medical worries to the traveler’s home. They still whispered amongst themselves. Sorcerer. Bloodpotter. But they did not make their protection signals so often. And they stopped glaring at Hen-Omen. Out of newfound respect, they asked her name when they came by to request some sort of antiseptic, painkiller, or stitches of their own. As Hen-Omen served them tea, the traveler would go out among the villagers reclined all over his main room and assess each cut and wound he had been brought. If it was a small matter, Hen-Omen was handed whatever liquids or tools were necessary to set the patient right. If it was more serious, she brought them to the traveler’s back room. He showed her other medicinal muds, tinctures, stitches, and patches, and how to turn the villager’s head away and distract them as he took a bit of blood, a slice of flesh, a fragment of bone, to hide under his tunic or tongue.

By the time Hen-Omen was nine years old, she had learnt to read pictures of bodies in the traveler’s anatomy books. By the time she was ten, she could read the words as well. Sometime after that, she was given a journal and made to record her own findings.

The house had a steady stream of visitors for medicines and stitches, thread for dyeing and weaving, and an occasional taste of a rare spiced treat. The name Bloodpotter no longer meant Demon of the War Dead to the community of Fauen. He had healed their crops and their streams and their bodies. And he charged them nothing. They stopped calling him demon, as he did no evil to them, and they stopped calling him traveler, as they loathed the very thought of him leaving one day.

The name Hen fell away entirely, too. Omen and the Bloodpotter became the healers of Fauen.

V.

In one of the Bloodpotter’s books was a series of sketches, and some handwritten notes about spells that were supposed to bring rain, fortune, crops, and other such things if done correctly. Some pages were filled with beautiful painted illustrations of dancers. Omen loved the ones who most closely resembled her Bloodpotter. A leaping dancer who had long arms like him, and another bowing dancer had a similar mop of thick hair. There was a page of diagrams of the faces of a person possessed by something evil; dispersed amongst the drawings were his eyelashes on this one, this one with his nose, this one with the smile he wore when he was telling a villager a naughty story. Beside the sketches of the twisting leaping bodies were the lines meant to indicate the path over the ground the dances were meant to take. Omen recognized some of the patterns as similar to the ones woven or painted into the rugs, and into the dark dirt of the house’s back room.

Omen had never seen dirt like the dirt that made up the floor of the back room.

A few weeks before the great party, several men of the village stopped by, without wound or want of medicine, and asked Omen, who was dyeing skeins of stalk silk in a pot out front, if they could speak with him. It was urgent. She ducked under the skin that hung in the doorframe and found her Bloodpotter reclined in front of the fire, chewing a tarry substance and spitting onto a live coal he held in his gloved fingers. It smoked blue, the smoke collecting in a glass jar suspended upside down above it. He sat up on his pillows and tucked his slippered feet in under his blanket, and the gray tunic over his upper body twitched and expanded, to give the impression that a fully muscled human body was underneath. He nodded at her when he was ready.

The men accepted his offer of strong, spiced tea, and spoke to him low about matters of grain, of hunger, and of taxation. Omen sat in the corner, close enough to catch any orders, far enough to pretend not to listen in. The talk of business turned to talk of pleasure, and Omen was sent to fetch a flask painted in blue flames that hung on a chain over his nest of bed pillows near the back room. Small glasses were also requested, and the men lifted their glasses, sipped their drinks, coughed theatrically, and cheered. More was poured.

Omen scooted closer and joined the rapt audience as her Bloodpotter told tales of his youth in the city. His idea to solve the taxation problem shifted into a storytelling session. She caught herself waiting to hear about some romance, but he only recounted pranks and parties, hilarious punishments and general mischief, as a youth in War Sorcery training. His stories of magic were far less demonic than they were expecting, and they told him so, eliciting his sunny laughter and calling for another toast. More villagers came in when they heard the merriment, as did the other beggar children, to listen to his tales. One sneaked a cup away from a drunken audience member and passed it around to the other young ones. As soon as the cup touched Omen’s fingertips, her Bloodpotter sent her a red-flashing warning look midsentence, and she pushed the cup away.

The Bloodpotter sent the men away before his midafternoon nap, with instructions to pack their tribute to the king in a very specific manner. The other beggar children were sent along with them. When they were alone, he called Omen to him.

As she sat, he handed her the tin of dark blue tar with the little silver spoon in it, and he leant forward to blow upon the coal, which began to glow red again from inside a little iron cup where he’d placed it.

Omen took a spoonful of the tar, the way she had seen him do it, and put it on her tongue. It was rich and sweet, a sort of resin. Her mouth filled with saliva almost instantly. She leant over and spat onto the coal, and the blue smoke rose, coiling up into the floating glass. She turned to see him settle into his pillows and close his eyes, the fabric of his tunic settling down across a body of skin and bone. She gazed at him as he slipped into slumber, then turned to spit on the coal as the taste in her mouth seemed to intensify and deepen. Soon it overwhelmed her. She inhaled the juice and coughed, choking as it burnt down her throat, clogging her lungs. Panicking as her mouth filled over and over, she reached over and shook the Bloodpotter’s leg, trying to wake him. He furrowed his brow in frustration and gestured languidly toward the back room. Take that racket into the garden.

She barely made it to the back before her whole body began to squeeze, and she vomited, over and over, into the dark dirt. The last stream of bile that splashed into the black soil tasted of blood, but this was a relief, as it meant the taste of the resin was passing. Weak and shaking, she rinsed her mouth out with water and went back where the Bloodpotter lay still as a statue on his pillows. She sat down beside him and sighed as he lifted his hand to pat her knee and pushed the little tin of resin and cup of coal closer to her. After an hour or so, he fetched her from the dirt in the back room, and told her to get his illusory charm book and follow him.

At dusk, the pair of them strode out to where the entire village had gathered around the pile of grains and skeins of stalk silk. Omen was blue in the lips and shivering hard, repeatedly spitting gray gunk into the dirt, but she waved off the villagers’ expressions of concern, beaming as the Bloodpotter patted her shoulder and pulled her behind him. He released her and began to circle the pile of offerings to the king and his hungry fighting soldiers, whispering a spell in a low voice. Omen thrilled to watch the placement of his feet, the sway of his neck and his arm, recognizing a banishing spell, a glamour, and a forgetting spell as he worked.

In the twilight, the pile of grains and skeins began to gleam. The villagers watched as he moved around the twinkling collection of their produce. Then quite suddenly, he turned to face them and instructed them to take the haul back inside the wall, a piece at a time, in the opposite order that it had been stacked.

When a villager grabbed a basket and pulled it from the top of the pile, a vision of the same basket remained right where it had been, glowing faintly. Amazed, everyone dove to take down the baskets and skeins, but even as they did, flickering images of the same seemed to stay put. Before long, a glowing pile of nothing glamoured to look like a large pile of grain bags and baskets glowed just outside the walls. The Bloodpotter assured him that the taxmen would believe they had packed it and taken it away every time they visited. The village of Fauen was now free of taxation; everything they grew, they would keep.

Shouts and cheers rang out through the crowd, and the Bloodpotter allowed himself to be borne up on the shoulders of several sturdy blacksmiths and carried away as they sang his praises. Omen clapped and laughed to see him celebrated as she felt he should have always been, and did not notice when General sidled up beside her. He expressed concern for how sick she looked. He had caught the warning glance the Bloodpotter had given her earlier that day while they were trying to sneak a drink, and he worried that she had been punished for what they had done. She assured him that it was all right, she had just taken poorly to the preparation of one of his elixirs. The minute she said so, she realized this would not set General at ease.

Walking her back to the house filled with revelers, General offered to take up some of her magic-preparation duties to spare her such pains. His offers were cheerfully refused, as was his insistence that she come out into the open air and work with them more often, for a change of pace. She hugged him round the shoulders amiably, and went into the house, smiling as she passed the dancers and drinkers, sneaking up into her nest to rest.

In the early morning, she came down to drink some water and check on the Bloodpotter. The floors of the main room were strewn with snoring bodies. She peeked around the back and found the Bloodpotter humming to himself, stooped over and poking a handful of harvested teeth into the black soil, one by one.

VI.

Once the door to the house had been opened to the public for socializing, it never seemed to shut. The quiet solitude of interesting tasks, of study and tidying, the afternoon naps had turned into an endless parade of visits from the various villagers. They wanted more than just mending now: they wanted tinctures that would make them feel and see interesting things. They wanted diagrams and instructions for ball games that were played in the King’s City, and they wanted to borrow the Bloodpotter’s musical instruments, to learn how to play. They wanted to be near him, hear him talk, offer him gifts woven out of stalk silk, to smell his perfumes and incenses, to look at the strange and beautiful collection of artifacts that he had— at least the ones that were not hidden in the room in the back. No one seemed to know about the back room, even when they were brought there and back out again, having made a donation they would not recollect. Omen was beside herself with irritation about the frenzy of admirers, and the only solace seemed to be that the Bloodpotter himself seemed equally as irritated.

His solution outraged her completely. He commanded the villagers to build an open-air public house in the center of the village, and instructed Omen and the beggars to run it. Omen fumed that he would cast her away with the rest of the villagers, but it quickly proved an entertaining diversion. The excess grain, and the excess time, created the opportunity for games, song, and the brewing and drinking of liquor. Daily, after the fields were tended to and the chores done, many of the men and women of the village would gather to make merry. General led the games. Omen tended the bar, doling out medicines, hallucinogens, and other sense-exploiters with a careful eye. She’d developed an understanding of the ingredients and the ratios of many an elixir and snuffing powder from her lessons with the Bloodpotter and her own readings of his books. She knew that he expected her to abstain from partaking in any of it herself, and so she did, watching the madness of joy take over the village, quietly satisfied to have a single source joy for herself.

Omen had her hands full in the evenings cleaning after the revelries, and in the mornings tending hangovers. She would set everyone up in a comfortable spot as they came in and tend to them, letting the Bloodpotter see who was there, and in what shape. Some he greeted warmly, shook their hands, and passed by. Upon seeing others, he would make a small signal to Omen and she delivered whatever medical care was necessary while secreting away some small vial of blood, a bit of broken tooth, a patch of scalp with live hair still growing on it, a hangnail removed with a bit of the quick still attached. She never asked why they needed to do these things; she just knew it was necessary for whatever the Bloodpotter was working on in the soil of the back room. She also knew, without having spoken to him about it, that these activities were best done discreetly, and that none of the other beggars were to know about it.

There was no doubt that they knew, though. Omen was certain that General had discovered something, and had told the others. They distanced themselves from her a little bit now. She did not mind.

The day a villager drunkenly removed his boot and showed everyone a neat scar where he’d had a toe removed, so expertly and painlessly by the Bloodpotter that he didn’t even remember the procedure, General stood straight-backed and glared at Omen. She would not meet his eye. Later that evening she went home and found General sitting at the fire, poring over one of the first books she’d been given to study. It had the spells that were formed in swirling patterns. He was looking at the spell for FORGET. She realized with a start that he was reading it. He set the book down as soon as Omen came in, and left without a word. None of the beggars slept in front of the house ever again.

When the Bloodpotter came out from the back room later, Omen asked him if he had taught General to read. He turned his face away from her, told her to gather the empty, dirty vials in the back room and wash them. Then he sank down into his pillows to sleep.

Omen began to watch General, and realized that he was watching her just as closely. He seemed to always be on the periphery of her vision: silhouetted against the light through the skin walls of the house as she studied potions, pulling stalks in the edge of the field as she set up the bar for the evening, sitting quietly alone by the stream and strumming a coarse couple of notes out of the only stringed instrument of the Bloodpotter’s that had survived rougher villager fingers when she went to fetch water. They never spoke, but his eyes were darker with worry and sadness than any anger or suspicion. Omen stopped him one evening after the Bloodpotter had disappeared behind the screen to the back room, and they walked together in the darkness toward the blacksmith halls, which were worked at night to help the smiths endure the heat. She asked him if the Bloodpotter had taught him to read.

He did not answer, but instead asked a question himself. What does he do with the pieces of our bodies that he keeps stealing?

They walked home in silence, without answers. Inside the house, the Bloodpotter was waiting for her. It was unnerving, as he was usually fully asleep at night, but he stood in the middle of the room, his hands behind his back, waiting. He gestured for her to sit with him at the table, and then pulled out his blue-flame flask. He poured her a drink, raised his own in toast, waited, and then set his down when she made no move to touch her cup.

Then the Bloodpotter asked his own question. I am your master. Would you like to know about mine?

VII.

There was a popular bedtime story for children, so popular that General had told it to the other beggar children years ago when they were sleeping out in the cold dirt beyond the walls of Fauen. The story was called “The Five Noblemen,” and it was considered to be based on real events regarding the King’s great war. The moral was supposedly that one should be grateful for what they have, and to be careful what they wished for.

In the story, the War had been going on for so long that the noblemen of the five highest-born families in the King’s City got restless for an even easier, more luxurious life than they already had. They came up with a plan to end the bloodshed that was robbing their estates of good servants and healthy farmers and beautiful diversions, of wealth and leisure. Four of the noblemen packed up their servants and mistresses and took them in caravans to the four corners of the kingdom to look for various weapons and talismans that would give them an advantage in the war, allowing it to end with them as the victor, placing that specific nobleman in power that surpassed even that of the king.

The last nobleman, with a pure heart and sweet nature, wanted only to end the war and bring peace to the whole world. So he packed one horse and provisions for one, kissed his sweet wife and his sweet children goodbye, and left his estate to set off to the battlefield. He intended to ask the conscripted villagers and imposing war sorcerers, even the little messenger children, how they thought the war could be quickly brought to an end.

What happened next depended heavily on who was telling the tale, how late it was, how many times the tale was interrupted by a curious child far from sleep. On holidays away from work, celebrating a harvest or waiting out a brutal winter storm, each nobleman’s trip was told in exquisite detail, with a few bawdy jokes hidden in for the adults listening in the room. But they all ended the same, generally. The fifth nobleman got bloodthirsty advice from everyone except for the littlest messenger boy, who was Death in disguise. Death said that he had a spirit road that led to a doorway, through which all spirits must pass, and that he could show the nobleman where it was. The nobleman could come and go as he pleased, could stand guard and keep anyone from passing beyond, sending them to be reunited with their bodies at his whim. After enough deaths and revivals, the exhausted soldiers might wise up and refuse to fight, ending the war. The brave fifth nobleman agreed to follow Death down the spirit road, but it was a trick. Death shoved the nobleman beyond the door, then scoured the four corners of the earth to find the other four and trick them all to death as well.

The story reminded all who heard it that questioning the will of the king, who desired this War despite the starvation and slaughter of his people, was a bad enough offense that even a humble and brave man like the fifth nobleman deserved to die for it. This was an unsatisfying lesson. Little children went to sleep irritated, pensive, and gently mutinous after hearing the end of the story. As they grew up, life wore them down to accept, without question, the will of the king, the way of things.

This was not the version the Bloodpotter told Omen that night.

There had been only three noblemen in the more factual retelling that he learnt in his history lessons in school in the King’s City. They were looking for lands beyond the war to further build their own wealth, where they would bring their families and caravans, claim their stakes. Eventually they would each get sucked into the war by their own greed—it was how the first war had started, after all.

But the nobleman on the battlefield, the one who had tried to convince the general to turn against the king, indeed found a Little Messenger. It was the name of a weed whose flower and roots, crushed and boiled together and drunk, made a powerful paralytic hallucinogen. One could die, and come back from the dead—or at least, that was how the experience was described. Too much, and there was no return. War-broken soldiers had developed an addiction to the weed, or used it to end their lives. The ones who used it regularly and in careful moderation began to show increased strength, stamina, and reflexes. They were even said to heal in triple time, and grow in savagery and efficiency.

A catastrophe was engineered on that battlefield that wiped out everyone there except the nobleman, who rode to the king and presented his highness with a small store of the last remaining Little Messenger plants in the land. The nobleman told the king’s advisors of its properties and was even able to present a demonstration. He did this hoping for favor. That nobleman was immediately assassinated, and talk of the Little Messenger was violently encouraged to cease. But in short time, the official calls for enlistment of strong new fighting recruits were paired with requests for fresh children, to be delivered to the king to train up as a new breed of sorcerer.

Using the plant, renamed the Pathflower, the school of War Sorcery was created. Its students, reared on history, propaganda, bloodshed, pain, and Pathflower, were sorted into two types. Those whose focus was physical battle were given the name HighSoldier, and they led the nonmagical fighters into battle. The other class of War Sorcerer was named Bloodpotter. They were given the task of maintaining HighSoldiers, through a style of magic that was not quite necromancy, but similar in nature.

Every HighSoldier had a Bloodpotter, just as every Pathflower blossom had roots to keep it alive. And the roots grew new flowers for the same plant, whenever it was necessary. HighSoldier children were given, throughout their young lives, bits of Pathflower petal and root that helped develop their physical strength and battle prowess. The Bloodpotter disciples drank brewed teas of stem and leaf, and were taught how to walk beside death, with sure footing and firm grasp on whatever they decided to drag there, or drag back, through the use of their gardens.

Blearily blinking in the light of morning, the Bloodpotter swirled the liquor in his cup, studying the weave of the table with his bright red eyes. He admitted to Omen that, when he first found her by the side of the road, he had felt her death wish, as well as the strength of her life force—it had called to him. He had intended to stay in the village long enough to fatten her up, strengthen her, and then take her away with him—to find a private place to create a garden, and to plant her there. But the village was agreeable to his needs, and alternative measures had been found. There was no need to sacrifice her to the soil he was brewing in the back room. And as for General, the Bloodpotter had begun to teach him how to read when he thought General would make a good replacement, or a good framing victim. Should his HighSoldier have called to him from The Path before the soil was ready, the Bloodpotter would have needed someone on his side to explain Omen’s sudden disappearance to the villagers, to lie on his behalf, or to take the blame. He had been nervously expecting, for some time, for General to grow affection for Omen, to discover possessiveness, and to tell her these things to drive a wedge between the two of them. He hoped she would not let it.

They sat in silence, punctuated by Omen’s tearful sniffles as she imagined the Bloodpotter crouched over the black soil of the back room, humming as he shoved her under to suffocate and choke on all the clods of gore and bone and wet dirt. She had thought he’d chosen her because she was special, but she was only ever Hen, a girl for the pot, of no further value to anyone. The Bloodpotter rose, pausing to remind her that he had changed his mind, had come to appreciate her presence, and that she was well cared for by him; that it would be unwise to dwell on irrelevant matters.

He went to lie on the pile of pillows by the cold hearth. Omen sat at the table, broken. When she sniffled again, he turned his face to her and said, Do not waste your tears. Go cry in the garden. It could use the salt.

VIII.

When Omen dreamed, she dreamed of the Bloodpotter.

The pain of knowing she was meant to be fertilizer faded as days passed and her tasks kept her occupied. When her heart dragged back the ugly memory of his confession, she shoved it away and replaced it with sweeter ones. The laughter on his beautiful face when talking with the other villagers. The peek of tongue between his lips when he was sewing up a wound or weaving bandages. The generosity with which he emptied his stores of honey over grain cakes for the visitors, filling their pockets with candy and lending out his drums and cymbals and some of his nonmagical picture books. She could barely remember the bed of hard dirt beside the road now, the poisoned water of the stream gurgling its lullaby, so many years ago. There was no more hunger in Fauen. There were no more taxmen—in the years since he met with the last ones, none had returned. The babies born to families were celebrated across the village, as there would never be a reason to leave children outside the walls to fend for themselves, not ever again. Omen knew her little life was worth all of these things and more, and so she forgave him. She even forgave General, who avoided her completely now, and even more so avoided the Bloodpotter.

It was clear her own generosity at offering unspoken forgiveness to the Bloodpotter had changed their relationship greatly. He now spoke with her about everything he was doing, and kept her by his side constantly. The villagers whispered to each other about the change in the growing young woman and the strange but attractive Sorcerer, nudging each other to notice the foul mood this kind of talk always put General in when he was around. In the house, Omen and the Bloodpotter read aloud to each other from the locked books, discussed strategies for collecting more bits of the villagers without alarming anyone, and they worked the soil together. Omen learnt that bits of villager were not the only additions to the soil. There were tinctures and syrups and powders added in specific patterns, at specific times of the month, and with specific purpose. The anatomy book Omen had memorized helped her to see that when the Bloodpotter painted a yellow sap in tiny branching lines over the top of the soil, hunched and crouched over it for so long that Omen ached in sympathetic pain, that the pattern mimicked the nerves of a body. Then when he opened a jar and poured a pile of ants in the middle of the design, their death march up and down the strands of painted syrup seemed to make the outline of the body come alive.

Seasons passed, the village of Fauen grew healthy and vibrant as the taxmen passed them by. Omen grew taller and tighter in the tunic, and the war seemed like it was happening in a world they were not a part of anymore.

Omen was seventeen the day she was allowed to feed the garden body by herself. She had sneaked into the goat pen the night before to steal a newborn goat twin and bring it to the Bloodpotter as a gift. The next evening, he called her into the back room, pointed at the specific jars she would need, and requested a skin for the garden body. Omen carefully laid a layer of dried meatfloss down in the shape of a man, then sprinkled a bit of blood over it. She moved slowly and painstakingly, and the Bloodpotter stood by, watching, without a word of correction. She took a jar of maggots down and sprinkled handfuls of the squirming mass, nudging them to fill in the shape. She was halfway done when the soil shivered, and the meatfloss and maggots all sank from view.

Omen turned around and dropped the pot of maggots, tripping and falling into the soil. The Bloodpotter’s eyes had gone fully black and tripled in size, darkness spreading across his face, leaking down into the fang-rimmed hole in his head that was now his mouth. His lips contorted around the word RUN. Then he lifted his hands, which had sprouted claws like great curved needles, and he lurched at Omen, who was lying in the soil. She rolled out of the way, but not before he’d torn a gash open in her leg. She kicked at the Bloodpotter’s chest as hard as she could, which did not budge him but propelled her to the far corner of the room. She crouched, bleeding and gasping for air as terror squeezed her chest, and watched the monster that had been the Bloodpotter begin to work the soil like never before.

One thing Omen learnt that night was the true shape of the Bloodpotter’s body. She had often wondered about him in her private moments, imagined his body like that of a fieldworker, but softer-skinned and wonderfully perfumed. She ignored the strange twitchings and flutters under his tunics, the way his spinal bones showed through the cloth when he was bent over concentrating on a fiddly task, the way his pelvis wings were sometimes so prominent on his hips. But as the thing clawed and dug and pounded his hands into the soil, the tunic tore away, and more hands appeared all over his body. The skin and skeletal structure was nearly obfuscated by a flurry of nightmarish arms sprouting from everywhere, ending in black-tipped claws. Some of the claws tore other hands open, or off, and they too were pounded into the soil.

Omen screamed herself hoarse, watching.

The black ichor pouring out of his eyes and mouth covered his face now; there appeared to be nothing there, a void. His curls had fallen off and were lying in clumps on the ground; new legs sprouted from his bony knees to stomp chunks of his own torn body parts into the soil.

The soil was changing too. Sparks of light danced across the surface as the gummy clumps began to smoothen out and ooze together, worked through by hundreds of clawed fingers, becoming a kind of clay. A claw lunged for Omen, who was too frozen in fear to dodge it, but it only wiped the blood pouring down her leg, and pressed the stain into the clay. Omen stood up shakily and edged herself around the border of the garden, her back pressed against the sturdy woven walls. The creature did not seem to notice her moving away, and kept working the soil as she sidled behind the bare, rib-stretched skin of his back. One last glance showed her that when one of the fists sank into the clay up to the elbow, the surface of the soil shuddered and began to bubble.

Nearly the whole village was standing in the dark outside the house, their torches lit, waiting, when Omen ran outside. Behind the villagers she could see lightning in the cloudless starry sky, skittering flickers of light just like what was dancing across the clay under the onslaught of the Bloodpotter creature. The villagers snatched her up and looked her all over, unnerved by the screams they had heard coming from inside the house before. General, standing at the front of the group, knelt to inspect her bleeding leg, and demanded to know what had happened. She whispered that the Bloodpotter was… Bloodpotting, and when he asked her again, unable to hear her over the rising wind, she told him, The HighSoldier is coming.

Frightened, nearly everyone returned to their homes. General cleaned and wrapped her leg, and the pair of them, along with all of the other ex-beggars, sat on the mats outside the house and waited for a sign. No one slept, but Omen was beginning to doze off in General’s arms when he gave her a gentle shake and said that she was being called. He helped her stand, and tried to go into the house with her, but the skin of the door slid between them, locking General out. The house shivered as the skins pulled tightly closed. The silhouette of General beating on the door-skin could be seen against the light behind him. Omen called out that she was all right, for him to go home and rest, then she turned to the pillows by the hearth to see what was snoring.

There lay the Bloodpotter, bonier than ever but otherwise whole and healthy in his gray tunic and trousers, gold slippers shining on his feet. Curled beside him, bald and naked as an egg, was an enormous man, ferociously muscled, his sleeping mouth open, drooling black ichor onto the pillow under his head.

IX.

Omen was never happier to be busy, or to be out of the Bloodpotter’s house, as the days following the appearance of the HighSoldier. She woke each day before dawn and sat herself on the mats outside, content to dye stalk silk or study spells or mix medicines or weave beautiful scarves. The more intricate the task, the better, because it took her mind from the new sights and sounds in the Bloodpotter’s house. She had thought the horror of the ritual the Bloodpotter referred to as The Walking would stain her sleep in horrible nightmares forever. But what followed was far more arresting, consuming her peace.

The Bloodpotter was no longer concealing the fact that he and his HighSoldier were lovers. Not that he had actually concealed it from her before. It had just never come up in conversation. Discussion of HighSoldiers and Bloodpotters had always either involved ritual, stories about the training at the school in the King’s City, or recitation of legends of famous HighSoldiers who had made great marks on the battlefields, or died in some spectacular fashion. But now the house was redolent with incense and the musky scent of the soil, the hum of low conversation and laughter, and other sounds, sounds to bring out a burning blush and a despairing ache in Omen. Sometimes the pair would be in the back room, sometimes twisted around each other on the pillows in front of the fire in the main room. Omen had taken to sleeping on the mat outside after the first night, to avoid the stirring sight of them.

And such a sight. The HighSoldier had been magnificent right away, even before the Bloodpotter laid the finishing touches on his body. The Bloodpotter worked to grow him eyebrows and lashes, eyes of dark maroon, the blush in his lips and the shadow of a beard, square fingernails, dimples in his chiseled cheeks. His wardrobe, loose shirts and trousers in brilliant black, were as often in heaps on the floor as draped over his gorgeous frame. But it was the vision of Bloodpotter himself that rendered Omen entirely undone. His usual uniform of gray tunics and trousers, a red scarf or two at the hip and around his neck, had been replaced by white, by brilliant blues and greens, embroidered with jewels in the images of fantastic animals. His skin glowed in contrast. And he had reworked his own body as well. Only two arms and two legs, exquisitely turned, his molded chest and the planes and curves of him exposed more often than not, so alluring that Omen could not speak when he was in sight.

She began to sample the liquor at the pub each shift. When one of her old beggar friends draped an arm around her shoulder while walking her home one drunken night, what was once a repulsive consideration became a moment of profound relief. The next evening at the pub, the sight of General’s face as he avoided eye contact with her, his jaw set tight, convinced her to try some of the other medicines as well. It would take some courage, she realized, to confront what was likely to occur—that she have a serious talk with General, and they, perhaps, begin to consider building a hut together, on the far side of the village, or perhaps just behind the pub. For the first time, Omen was realizing that there might be a life for her beyond her service to the Bloodpotter. Sometimes the thought soothed her, or even exhilarated her, but most often it opened a yawning hole in her stomach that she thought she would collapse into. Medicine and liquor were the only things to drive that bleakness away.

One late afternoon, after she’d scratched her arms up badly helping to harvest grain, grateful to the itch for being an added distraction from her tortures, she and some of the blacksmiths were sitting together at the pub. Omen was reciting a story to them, with General sat beside her. He had begrudgingly forgiven her dalliance with their friend. Wanting peace, Omen had started to court him, seeking General out in the fields each day, or in the blacksmith hall in the evenings, delivering him little tokens or a smile and a bit of company, delighting their gossiping neighbors. Pacified, he strummed low under her recitations, on one of the Bloodpotter’s string instruments that he had repaired, picking out a tune he had heard a traveler taxman whistle long ago. The HighSoldier appeared at the edge of the crowd, sudden as a swooping raptor, big and dark as a thunderstorm.

Everyone turned their heads to look upon him, in his head-to-toe black clothing, his large square feet bare in the dirt, a red sash tied around his whittled waist. His beard had come in fuller now, and he wore a single hoop of gold in one ear, and a wry smile on his face. In a low and carrying voice, he asked General for the instrument.

It wept delicate melodies in his hands. When he lifted his head back and began to sing along, in a language none of them knew, Omen forgot everything else until he had finished.

He could withstand only a moment of applause before he yelled out a request to himself for a happier tune, and began to strum the instrument so hard Omen thought it might split in half. He shouted out the lyrics to a bawdy jig, and when he began to dance along to his own song, everyone danced with him.

Sweat-soaked, they all leapt and clapped and spun and sang. The HighSoldier dodged in and out of the crowd with a nimbleness that could barely be believed of anyone his size. He took Omen in his arms and spun her around until she was dizzy. When he set her down again, she was relieved to see General in tears with laughter, watching her try to steady herself as the HighSoldier took up the next villager and spun him too. He taught them new songs and new dances, acted out jokes and recited poems, gathering the crowd until nearly the whole village was there.

Omen felt her name spoken before she saw the Bloodpotter, standing far down the road, a pale blue figure, red eyes glowing, still as a stone and radiating anger. In the crowd of dancing villagers, Omen turned to see the HighSoldier looking in the Bloodpotter’s direction as well.

The HighSoldier reached out and grabbed up armfuls of villagers in hugs, promising to stop by to help with the harvest tomorrow, to come inspect the weapons in the blacksmith hall, to return to the pub with a wind instrument or two that he thought might have survived. Then he walked away, under the dusky sky, up to the Bloodpotter and past him, and into the house. The Bloodpotter did not move from his spot, so Omen, shooting a sheepish glance at General, left the still-dancing, still-singing villagers, and walked down the road to her Master.

From the set of his jaw and the flash of his eyes, she was expecting excoriation from him. But when she was near enough he reached out and, ignoring her flinch, drew her close and whispered, Do not leave us again. I need you to watch him.

Back in the house, Omen sat at the newly broken woven-top table and watched the Bloodpotter nervously as he tidied the wreckage of his house. His collection of books appeared to have been torn into pieces and flung all around the room, and he was gently gathering up the bits and repairing what he could. Pillows had been ripped open, and half of the hearthstones had been crushed. Mats were rent to tatters, and there was a small split in one of the skin walls. She did not ask about it, only prepared some tea for him and watched him work. When he sat to rest, he looked across the table to where she was sitting, his red eyes red-rimmed from tears, and told her about past gardens.

Bloodpotters rarely love, he explained. They are taken from their parents at an early age, and taught to expect the death and destruction of everything beautiful and wonderful in life, that the only solace would be to learn the skills to decide when such bitter things can happen. But the HighSoldier and the Bloodpotter had loved each other instantly, before they even been assigned their roles, before they had been assigned to each other. They drove each other, challenged each other to such perfection of their craft, of magic, of creation and recreation and destruction, until no other consideration for pairing was raised by the schoolmasters. And when the boys had finished their training and began their work in the War, the Bloodpotter learnt that what he had never been prepared for was a life spent away from his heart and soul, his best friend.

Day after day, year after year, the Bloodpotter had to wait alone as his HighSoldier fought in horrible battles for the king far away. To be separated from his HighSoldier was nearly unbearable, a dull and crushing ache relieved by the horror, and relief, of hearing him call from Death’s road.

But with each new resurrection, decades apart, the Highsoldier was a little bit changed. Less and less of the friend and lover remained. More and more of him was just bloodlust and violent pride. The HighSoldier would spend months recuperating and training his new body back in the school training yards, but soon it was only weeks after a resurrection, then only days. So the Bloodpotter came up with his first plan. He would convince the HighSoldier to defect. They would leave the King’s City and the battlefields behind and go away to live only for each other. It took a few tries to get the HighSoldier to consider it, but the Bloodpotter was clever and relentless and finally persuaded him. Or so he thought. Instead, the dawn after they had escaped, the Bloodpotter found himself alone, the HighSoldier having snuck off to battle.

The Bloodpotter searched everywhere for him, disguising himself and sneaking onto various battlefields to try to find his love. He was caught off guard one night, sleeping at the back of a brothel in a coastal city, when he felt his HighSoldier calling from death’s gate.

That was the first time, the Bloodpotter said, that I was forced to make a garden out of a friend. Before, suitable prisoners of war or traitors to the king were provided to the Bloodpotter school and alumni, to be used to enrich the soil in their gardens. Out on the road, the Bloodpotter had to take what he needed.

In that coastal town, the resurrected HighSoldier stayed for a whole month, luxuriating in the ease and fascinating aspects of this new environment, before his boredom and pride drew him back to battle again. But now the Bloodpotter had a new plan.

He traveled, looking for new and interesting places, looking to get far enough away from the King’s City and the battlefields that he would have enough time to figure out how to make the HighSoldier stay. He packed his cart with diversions of art and music, which always drew him, and practiced at altering his own appearance to make himself irresistible. He went through town after village after city, keeping some form of company close at hand so as to be able to make an emergency garden at a moment’s notice. Aspects of the person chosen to feed the soil stayed in the HighSoldier for a time, so he chose the meek, the strong but easily led, and he made his captive obsessed him so that the HighSoldier’s love would intensify.

Omen had been the last one chosen to be a garden. But the Bloodpotter had grown tired, sloppy, and lonely, allowing himself to depend more thoroughly upon the companion he kept, the beggar child. He was astonished to find that she loved him better than anyone ever had. And that he appreciated that love. He valued her so well that he made a garden out of the whole village instead, even sparing their lives as he did so, just for her. Because in building a new life for her, he discovered that there might be a new life for him as well.

I should have buried you, Omen, he said, wiping a pink-stained tear away from his cheek. The mix, all these people, they make him impossible to control. Your essence, your obedience would have made him stay longer. But then his will would have crushed yours eventually, and he would have left me again, and you would be gone too.

I know he is thinking of leaving again. This is faster than it has ever happened. I’m going to try to stop him. But if I cannot, I will need you.

The Bloodpotter ran his human-looking bare fingertip around the large hole punched into the middle of the woven table. Omen watched, daring not to look at his face anymore. He was so hurt, so frightened, and that made her sad, but she…she was loved. He had as good as said so. He did not want to live without her. And she knew she would do anything for him, even if it meant tearing the HighSoldier apart with her own bare hands. Anything to keep her Bloodpotter beside her, safe in her love.

X.

Watch him.

Omen repeated the Bloodpotter’s command to herself as she polished his gold slippers on the mats out front of the house. Villagers passed and greeted her, wondering when the HighSoldier would be coming out. She told them that she suspected he’d sneak away again, at midday when nothing could rouse the Bloodpotter from his nap. And this he did, parting the curtain and tiptoeing onto Omen’s mat, his manner of theatrical sneakiness so ridiculous that she could not stifle a giggle. He took her hand and batted the slippers away, pulled her toward the grain fields as a cheer rose from the villagers who spied his approach.

Being with the HighSoldier meant seeing Fauen through brand-new eyes. Of course, the town had changed quite a bit since the Bloodpotter came to town. But the HighSoldier exclaimed over the height of the grain stalks and the brilliant colors of the drying silks in the dye huts. He harvested a row of grain in record time, his shirt off and his body glistening in the sun, his loud booming call of challenge spurring the others to race him through the rows. In the blacksmith hall, he handed Omen and General each a sword and taught them how to lift and set their stances, how to run through easy sparring movements. General’s eyes flashed and he smirked at Omen, who felt herself flush and lift her chin in defiance of his upcoming choreographed strike.

Meals and tea were brought and shared around the cooling yard, and the HighSoldier told more stories, stories of his glorious battles, even some of his more exciting deaths. All other work was forgotten—everyone listened rapturously. Some villagers began to practice sparring, and some to act out the scenes as he told them, to the merriment of all. Feelings got so high that for a moment Omen began to feel a lust for battle herself, completely forgiving him for thinking of leaving the demon behind. Then the wind shifted away from the forges, and the smell of the garden soil, the incense of magic, made itself known.

She knew that scent. The HighSoldier was weaving a spell, and he had them all under it.

Omen snuck away from the cheering crowd and walked along the backs of the houses, in the shadows, to avoid being seen. She found the Bloodpotter just rousing from his sleep, his rosy eyes dreamy, and he greeted her with Where is he?

Out at the blacksmith halls, Omen said.

Bloodpotter yawned. What is he doing there?

Teaching us to fight, Omen said. Teaching us to march. What does it mean when he fills the air with the smell of the garden?

Omen didn’t have time to get out of the way; the Bloodpotter shot up out of his nest and shoved her aside, striding out the door. She spun and followed him out to the middle of the village path, where the HighSoldier was singing a war song and several dozen villagers were marching in time to it, as others clapped and cheered on either side. The weapons of the forge were in almost every hand. General, near the front of the line, waved at Omen. Her spirits beginning to lift again, with the scent of the soil and the voice of the HighSoldier fluttering her heart inside her chest. The Bloodpotter stood facing the approaching crowd. He lifted his hand over his head, and Omen saw it darken, as if with the black magic that had, days ago, swallowed his face as he resurrected his lover from the soil. His claws grew out, and he slashed at the air. All at once the HighSoldier’s song ceased, and he stumbled and fell to his knees, holding his face. All the marching villagers fell, too, crying out in terror, clutching themselves.

A searing pain erupted across the side of Omen’s head, burning her eye. She fell at the Bloodpotter’s feet, and from there she watched the HighSoldier rise, a grin on his black-blood-soaked face, as the villagers near him scrambled over fallen weapons to get away. He shouted something at the Bloodpotter, in another language, and the Bloodpotter answered him in kind, in a snarl, and screamed over a rising wind, Release them, and submit to me!

The HighSoldier roared and charged, and the Bloodpotter erupted arms and claws and blooms of black fog, and they crashed together.

Omen felt her body tear apart.

XI.

Omen awoke in the cool of the house. The mat to which her face was stuck was soaked in blood, and her muscles and joints felt frozen in pain. She gingerly flexed her fingers, her wrist, and twisted her neck slowly, discovering soreness did not equal injury. She rose gingerly, her head spinning, and then hunched over and vomited black soil onto the carpet by her feet.

She looked around. The house looked the same as it had before when she had come in after the HighSoldier’s rampage, except one of the house walls was torn wide open. Through this, Omen could see the path outside was strewn with the bloody, torn, unmoving bodies of the villagers.

She stared at them for a moment, then turned her bleary eyes over to some movement in the corner of the room. The Bloodpotter lay on the cushions by the ruined hearth, naked and mottled in bruises, all bones and stretched skin. Dozens of arms tipped in long black claws wrapped around a long, bright pink pillow. His half-hidden face was black fog, his red eyes gone.

Omen stood and waited for the dizzy spell to pass, then stepped carefully over to his nest. The black void of face tilted up slightly, and out of it came the whisper, Omen. Please.

Omen lowered herself onto the pillow and lay beside him, running the tips of her fingers over his ear until he shifted forward and drew her against his desiccated body, all of his arms enfolding her, the incense of him easing her pain and replacing the rotten taste of soil and bile in her mouth. Her neck went cold from where he smashed his facelessness against her skin, then warmed as his face took shape again, filling out his nose and lips, wetting her with his tears.

She didn’t ask if the HighSoldier had gone; she could feel his distance. She could also feel the villagers who had survived but had been too deeply under the HighSoldier’s thrall to let him leave without them. He owned them now, her General among them, these villagers whose blood and bone and skin made up his body, to whom he would be linked until the battle chewed them into the dirt of the killing fields, long before his next walk on the death’s road. They would join the War as new fighters and charge onto the swarms of enemies, where they would quickly be crushed under blows that could only glance off the HighSoldier like raindrops. Outside she could hear the crying of the survivors who had never lost a single piece of themselves to the soil or been beguiled by the magic of the HighSoldier. They had not been affected by the attack on the HighSoldier’s borrowed body and were left to witness the bloody scene in sober terror. These, and the ones fallen, the marching lost, her villagers—

Omen realized how truly she had betrayed them all. She had led the War into Fauen, in the form of a beautiful traveler, and out of all of Fauen, it seemed only death would survive.

Clasped so tightly to her Bloodpotter’s bony body, Omen dreamed herself a child again. Little Hen, destined for the pot. Better as a stew. She saw her villagers depositing babies outside the walls, and turning away. The hunger, the bleak lives, the despair she had almost forgotten. War had always been there in the village. Incense wafted across the child Hen’s face and she closed her eyes and sniffed. Omen knew the Bloodpotter was speaking her dream into her sleep, and she accepted every word. He had not brought the War—it had brought him, and it had robbed them both.

It was dusk when she felt the chill hit her skin. The wind blew cool over the places where the Bloodpotter’s arms had held her. She opened her eyes to see him pulling his gray tunic over his head, dragging gray trousers up his legs, his gold slippers already on his two feet, gloves on his two hands.

She rose as well, coughed and spat up a bit more soil, and began to help him pack up his cart. There was no art to it; they flung everything in as it was, and most of it seemed to fit. The rest, dirty bottles of elixirs and boxes of spices and swatches of torn fabric and tattered books, he left behind, strewn across the stained mats under the black timbers of their house. It took very little time to finish.

She walked him out of town. It was slow going, as there were still some bodies in the street; the cart had to be shoved to either side or it would have rolled its heavy wheels right over them. In the pink light of the setting sun, the Bloodpotter kissed Omen tenderly on the lips, tasting like honeyed grain, a last deep sweetness. Before he and his cart turned onto the road that would lead them ever further away from the battlefields and the King’s City, he gave her one last order. Or it may have been a plea. Redeem me.

She watched the horizon he disappeared into as night fell, numb and empty of thought. She did not even turn when she heard some of the remaining villagers creep up and close the gate, sealing the walls of Fauen to her for good.

Epilogue

Omen was a traveler, all alone under the flat blue sky, on the flat dirt road, surrounded by nothingness. Around her head she tied a single scarf, faded to pink from the sun. Far behind her, the cursed village of Fauen lay broken, burnt, and dead. The villagers had set her house on fire after they locked her out of the wall. She could smell all the broken beautiful things her Bloodpotter had left behind burning, smell his spices in the air, and the curious scent of the paper in his books. She had not yet begun to grieve for all that she had lost when an explosion brought a section of the wall down, battering her ears to ringing. They had set the pub alight too, without checking if the casks of liquor had been removed.

There was screaming. Then burning bodies began to stream past her, out into the darkness beyond the road, flailing and stumbling until they slowed and dropped into the dirt, still burning. Some had the presence of mind to fling themselves into the stream; that only prolonged the agony of their deaths. Soon the whole village behind her was burning, and the air filled with the sweet smell of cooking meat. When the smell began to entice her, after several days sitting beside the wall waiting for death, she picked herself up, set her back to the direction of the King’s City, and began to walk.

Somewhere ahead there was love, incense, and sweet honeyed cakes, nests of pillows and whole realms of delight in stacks of storybooks. There was nothing else in the world for her, nothing to redeem. So many arms to hold her, so many bits of her to use, if she could just find him. She was ready. Somehow, someway, she would grow a garden.

Publisher: Sean Markey
Cover Art: Mateus Roberts
Cover Design: Christine M. Scott
Featured Image: inkshark
Editor: E. Catherine Tobler
Copy Editor: Laura Blackwell

14,700 words, published September 2025