Antiphon by Ken Scholes

for his glass of chilled peach wine but found that his interest in it had passed. Instead, Rudolfo fixed his eyes upon his sleeping son and pondered the darkening paths that lay before them both.
Neb

    Neb sat in the shadowed opening of a glass cave and watched the dark bird moving high across the sky. He’d seen more of them in the last day, and unlike the messenger birds, these seemed to fly with purpose and direction in this desolate place.
    Renard had called them
kin-raven
, but he’d also told him that they were supposedly extinct . . . until approximately two years ago, when the first of their kind had migrated back to the Named Lands. Though they flew too high for him to tell, he wondered if it was the same species he used to see in Winters’s dreams.
    Once the kin-raven passed, he went back to lacquering his thorn rifle and wetting the bulb for another night of guarding the woman.
    She’d stirred but had not awakened since he pulled her from the rubble and washed her wounds. He’d mixed the herbs and powders as Renard had showed him, adding extra kalla for the pain she’d feel if the wolf venom took. Then, he wrapped her with bandages torn from a clean cotton shirt he’d found in her bag.
    Last, he found the cave, twisted into a wall of glass, where they could wait out the worst of her wounds. He marked their territory, shaking drops from his phial of kin-wolf urine though he doubted it would work with the girl’s blood on the wind. Then, he rolled large rocks in front of the opening, leaving just enough room for him to squeeze through if he needed to. And so, he forced himself awake, chewing the root for focus.
    He put away his rifle brush and lacquer pot, then crawled back to check on the woman again. She moaned in her sleep from time to time, twisting in the blanket he’d wrapped her in. Neb found himself trying hard not to look at her. Her chiseled features and the gentle curves of her pulled at his eyes. He forced them to her scars.
    The cuttings were clearly intentional, forming symbols that he recognized from his years in the Franci orphanage in the shadow of the Androfrancine’s Great Library. It was the language of blood magick; the cuttings of House Y’Zir and its Wizard Kings. He could not read the runes from that former age, but he knew there was dark meaning behind them.
    He crouched beside her now and placed a hand upon her forehead. She was cool and clammy to his touch and she stirred again, the blanket falling aside to reveal another curve. When he averted his eyes, they fell upon her pack.
    It was small, made for traveling fast and light, not dissimilar to those the Gypsy Scouts wore. Apart from the clean shirt he’d shredded, he’d not gone through it other than to be certain there were no weapons. Her dark iron scout knives were safely tucked away, out of reach and out of sight.
    He stared at the pack for a full minute, biting his lower lip. But in the end, he did what he thought Rudolfo or Renard would do; he reached for the pack and retreated with it to the mouth of the cave.
    Neb eased the contents out onto the fused glass floor and used his hands to spread them out. He felt his cheeks grow warm when he saw her undergarments and toiletry kit.
    He pushed them aside and picked up a compact, thick book. It was old, and he opened it, not recognizing the language within it. But he saw that it was marked with notes, including an inscription in the front. A few of the letters looked familiar but none registered. He set it aside and next looked to the tarnished silver flask. Holding it to his ear he shook it gently.
    Half-empty.
He hesitated, then unscrewed the top to sniff the contents. The rancid smell turned his stomach, and he glanced back to the woman again. His initial thought was that these were blood magicks—that perhaps she was one of these runners—but he thrust the thought aside. The blood magicks he’d seen lasted three to five days and, in the end, killed their users,