Free Crossed Blades by Kelly McCullough Page A

drink—damn but I needed that. “I also remember how much good all those words did when the Hand of Heaven came knocking on the temple door. There was a lot the priests didn’t know.”
    “Aral’s a little bitter,” said Triss from the mouth of the smuggling compartment. “In case you hadn’t guessed.”
    “So am I,” said Jax. “But drinking that way? How could you?”
    “I’ll show you.” I took my third drink in as many minutes.
    I hadn’t drunk like this in a while—Triss hated my drinking and I tried to control it for him even when I couldn’t for me. In my better moments, I succeeded. This wasn’t one of my better moments, and that felt fucking wonderful, though the booze hadn’t hit me nearly as hard as it should have. In fact, I’d burned so much nima that it felt like it was mostly just vanishing. Too bad. Sticking the cork back in the bottle I set it beside Jax.
    “It’s there in case you want some.” Her jaw tightened in an all-too-familiar anger. “Before you throw the bottle across the room, or start yelling at me, I’ve got two things to say. One, we’re trying to stay hidden here. Two, ‘spirits for the drained spirit.’”
    “What the hell are you talking about, Aral?”
    I was pleased to note that despite the obvious anger in her voice, she kept it low and quiet.
    “Nima,” Triss said to Jax. “It’s something we learned from . . . another mage. If you’ve overtapped the well of your soul—as Aral did getting us all here alive—you can temporarily recover some of what you’ve lost by drinking. That’s why Aral hasn’t fallen over yet, neither from exhaustion, nor from drinking half a pint of cask-strength whiskey.”
    Jax’s expression calmed and she bit her lip. “Really?”
    “I take it there’s nothing back in there that we have to worry about, Triss?” My question came out a lot grumpier than I’d intended and I knew the reason for that.
    It hadn’t escaped me that in the years after Jax and I stopped being an us, she’d continued to get along beautifully with Triss, and vice versa. I resented that, though it made me feel petty. When Triss didn’t answer me, I went back to making space.
    “That seems an awfully useful thing to know,” Jax said after a while. “Why wouldn’t the priests have told us about it?”
    “Because it only works when you’ve pushed yourself too far,” replied Triss, his voice low and worried. “And, if you do it very often, it’ll hollow you out like a piece of old bamboo. Pretty soon you’ll start to feel like the only thing that can fill that void is more booze. It works in the short term, and sometimes I’ll even say it’s a good idea, but what drink does to your kind, over time, is ugly.”
    I closed my eyes and bit back my instinctive response. Then I pulled out one last crate of expensive tea and dumped it in the water.
    “And there we go. Your bower awaits, Master Jax.”
    She looked up at me and I was shocked to see tears on her cheeks. “I’m sorry I didn’t come looking for you earlier, Aral.”
    “Why do you say that?”
    “I waited until I needed your help. And because of that, I think I missed the time when you needed mine.”
    I felt my throat go tight, but I didn’t have any good answer for that, so I turned away. I wanted to yell at her. Not because she was wrong, but because she almost certainly wasn’t. Eight years on from the mess we’d made of what should have been the best thing that ever happened to me, and she still knew me better than I’d ever known myself. Two sentences and she’d cut straight through all the armor and all the cynicism and drawn blood. She had no fucking right to still be able to do that to me. Not anymore.
    When I finally turned back around, she’d crawled up the stairs into the smuggler’s stash, though I hadn’t heard her move. A glance through the hatch showed her curled tightly in a hundred silver riels worth of silk and dead asleep. She’d left just enough