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Count Evrard departs to the motherless trees to see to the last of their guests. Alia expects the next she hears from him to be that Prince Warin is dead, lost to the jaws of the beast below.
Instead, Evrard returns with a still-beating heart, and much less anticipated news: this man is not Prince Warin at all. And he is not going to die.
This second part is not a statement so much as it is an order. When the two come back up from the underground, the-man-that-is-not-Warin is alive but barely standing, covered in the ichorous remains of the Dark Young (and isn’t that an interesting trick, she thinks.) She looks for a wound to match the crimson on his gloves, and finds none—at least, not until he loses his footing entirely in another bout of hoarse coughing, and his hand comes away from his mouth with something red and glistening nestled in its palm.
He’d named his master as Horig, the Unclean, earlier, perhaps believing she would not hear. The statement did not ring true to her ears, not for the context it was spoken in—but nor, strangely, did it have the tang of a true falsehood. She’d assumed this would be a passing discrepancy. Now, it seems, she has an explanation.
Evrard asks her to see to his health, so she does, leading him to all but collapse on one of the tables so she can work. The physical location of Castle Kerringford means that this affliction is regrettably familiar to her. She is surprised, almost, when she realizes how recent his role as apostle is, compared with how advanced the plague has become. Most victims take days, if not weeks, to succumb, to reach the point where the blood begins to clot, where pieces of the lungs have begun to work their way up the throat with each wracking cough.
Though most, it seems, have more to give than this man does. She generally does not concern herself with such details, but she finds herself wondering at Evrard's plan, here. Surely, even lacking her gifts, he can simply use his eyes to see how spent his newest fascination is. Whatever animates him, surely it won’t…
Ah. Hm. She recognizes the mark of that talisman—the one that had, at last estimation, belonged to the child of Mother Darkness who kept her home a few days’ travel away.
Yes, this is a strange one indeed.
She finds her attention wandering, but briefly, caught by a curiosity that is nearly alien to her. The plague of the Unclean clings to the insides of his lungs, but the outside of his organs are littered with… pockmarks. Tiny, gnawing bites. Given the reanimation he apparently underwent, she can guess at their source fairly easily. It’s odd, though, that he is so wholly alive after such a certain death. As if life had been somehow unwilling to relinquish its hold on him, even as his very flesh was set upon by scavengers.
Rather than decay, as she would expect from a victim of both Horig and the hag, on further exploration she finds quite the opposite: a plant, a living, growing organism embedded in his hand. The species is known to her, but she can’t fathom what it’s doing here in their world, growing into his still-living flesh. The piece of it visible to the eye is small, but its roots are deep. They twist into his wasted veins to drink greedily from what lifeblood remains in him, cling to the surface of his bones like spreading ivy. How long did it take, she wonders, for it to grow to this point? Is he even aware of how far it’s spread, hidden under his skin?
But even that is not the strangest thing about him. As she works her way over him, she becomes aware of a… presence. It’s strongest in the root-bound hand, or so she thinks at first, but she soon realizes that it isn’t confined to any one place. It permeates his very being so thoroughly that the two were rendered nearly indistinguishable from a distance, mixed like firelight might with the glow of the sun.
An indescribable presence—an impossible presence. Something that should not be, and yet somehow is.
It’s afflicted his eyes, she realizes. Mangled them. They can’t possibly work anymore. They could be mended, perhaps, though she has no way of knowing what that would do to the impossible thing that stains them. But—well.
She was not asked to fix his eyes.
So she doesn’t. She washes away the plague, and leaves the rest untouched. And as her patient gasps in breaths of stale cellar air like it’s the sweetest thing he’s ever tasted, she wonders. At the extent of the foreign influences written into his being. It’s not the first time she’s asked herself the question—far from it. She’s had cause to think on the subject many times, over the course of her life. But this stranger presents as almost—a case study.
How much of his body and soul can a man forfeit to other beings, before he ceases to be a man at all?
And, despite Evrard’s confidence in what he’s seen—
Can they truly trust such a creature?