I Only Summon Villainesses

It took most of a day to get down to it, and the last two hours of that were the strangest walking I have ever done, because the air kept getting better.

That is the only way I can put it. Everyone felt it and nobody said anything for a long time. The cold went out of the rock in stages. My fingers stopped aching somewhere around the third shelf and I did not notice until later, the way you do not notice a noise stopping.

Bren started crying about an hour above the seam and could not tell us why.

She was furious about it. She kept walking and wiping her face with the back of her wrist and saying ”I don’t know, I don’t know what this is,” and the big man put his hand on her shoulder and left it there, and she let him.

The silent one lifted his face to it. That was the first thing I ever saw him do on purpose.

The seam itself was a crack in the world about four feet across at its widest, running out of sight in both directions, and the red came up out of it in a slow steady breath you could see the air bending over.

We stopped eighty paces off and it was already too warm to keep my coat on.

Devant crouched at the edge of the shelf and looked down the line of it.

”Closer than forty and you will start to cook. Further than a hundred and you are simply sitting in a warm room.”

”So sixty.”

”Perhaps.”

’Perhaps. Wonderful.’

”You’ve been here before.”

”Twice.” He did not elaborate on either, and I did not have the patience to dig. ”The first one I brought in was too far out for two days and nothing changed, so on the third day I moved her in. The second one I put where I had put the first one on the third day, straight away, because that is what had worked.”

He stood and dusted his hands.

”That one cooked in about four hours. There is no distance. There is only the distance for the particular person, and I have never once found a way to know it in advance.”

Light had Ilse on the ground with his coat folded under her head.

”Then we start far and move in.”

”You have days.”

”She has less than days,” Light said, ”and I am not putting her at sixty paces on your arithmetic.”

That was the first time those two had disagreed out loud, and I want it noted that Devant did not argue. He shrugged, and went and sat down against a rock at what I paced out later as eighty-five, and watched us work from there.

We built her a place at ninety.

It took two hours. Light laid out flat stone and I carried it, and the big man carried more than both of us, and Bren went along the seam with her hands out at waist height feeling for where the heat changed and calling numbers back that meant nothing to anyone but her and turned out later to be very accurate.

The wyvern took itself to sixty on three legs and lay down there and would not be moved, and Light let it, and it slept for eleven hours with its ruined side toward the light.

When the place was ready I went and picked her up.

She weighed nothing. I have been carrying that woman for eight days and I would have told you I knew exactly what she weighed, and somewhere in the last two she had gone lighter, and I had not noticed that either.

I put her down on the warm stone with her face toward the seam.

Then we sat and watched a woman not die, which is a great deal harder than it sounds, and took it in shifts to put water into her, and nothing at all happened for the rest of that day or the night after it.

On the second morning her hands were still cold.

I had my palm flat on her sternum for most of that morning. Nothing came up through it.

’Move her in.’

I said it to Light out loud and he said no, and I said it again two hours later and he said no again, and around midday I got up to do it anyway and he stood up with me and put his hand on my chest.

”You will kill her.”

”She’s dying at ninety.”

”Slowly. That is different from cooking, and slowly is the only thing we have that can still be corrected.”

”Every hour she’s here is an hour she—”

”Cade.” He did not raise his voice and he did not take his hand off my chest. ”If you move her and she dies of it, you will have to know that. Forever. And I am asking you to wait until tomorrow because I do not want that for you.”

’...’

I sat back down.

He was right and I have never wanted to hit anybody so much in my life.

That evening Bren brought me a cup of the hot water we had been making and sat down beside me without being asked, the way she does now.

”He’s a good man.”

”He’s an insufferable man.”

”Both, then.” She pulled her knees up. ”My husband was neither and I still miss him.”

We moved her to seventy on the third morning.

I did it, and Light helped me, and neither of us said anything about the argument.

And by that evening her hands had stopped being cold.

Not warm. Just no longer that particular cold that had been coming off her since the crack under the slab, the cold I had been putting my palm on every night for a week and getting nothing back from.

Bren noticed before I did. She had Ilse’s fingers in hers and she went very still and then she said, ”Cade,” in a voice I had not heard out of her.

I got over there and took the hand off her and held it.

’...There it is.’

Behind me Devant stood up off his rock, which he had not done in three days, and came over and looked down at her for a while without saying a word.

Then he went back and sat down again.

He had told us, that morning, that moving her to seventy would not make any difference at all.