The Gembound: The Price of Keeping Chapter 50: Volume 2: Chapter 48 — Reclamation & Forge

Read chapter 50 of The Gembound: The Price of Keeping by Taliorn on NovelPedia.

Volume 2: Chapter 48 — Reclamation & Forge Three days after Pale Stone Valley. The wounded filled the Registry's lower halls, sixty regulars on cots that had been meant for records, twelve Enhanced propped against walls because lying down made the green veins ache. The air smelled like copper, and the particular sweetness of bodies trying to decide whether healing was worth the cost. Yara walked the rows. Her scar pulled when she breathed. The wasted beasts had torn the wound as she remade... no, used them for minutes before they melted, but it had been enough for her to reach Severin. She now had a chance to not make waste to make right, so she endured the pain; pain was arithmetic now. She could count it, file it, and use it to measure whether standing made sense. Eliza followed two steps behind, ledger open, quill moving. The scratch of ink was the only sound some of the wounded seemed to hear. "Forty dead," Eliza said, not looking up. “Fifteen Enhanced among them. The pikeman's throat was torn. The archer's chest caved. Others." Her quill paused. “Twelve Enhanced were wounded but recoverable. Sixty regulars, thirty will heal naturally, thirty won't." Yara stopped at a regular who had a leg that bent wrong below the knee. He was awake, staring at the ceiling, breathing through cloth because screaming cost energy he didn't have. "This one?" Yara asked. Eliza consulted her notes. "Shattered femur. Infection likely. Bruno says he has days, maybe a week. Won't walk again even if he survives." Yara knelt. The man's eyes tracked to her. "Can you give me something?" she asked. "An anchor. Something that matters." His hand fumbled at his neck. A cord leather, worn soft. A child's tooth on it, small and white. "My son's," he whispered. "First one. Kept it." "If I use this," Yara said, "you'll be Enhanced. Stronger. The leg will be better than it was. But you'll be mine. Bonded. Do you understand?" The man looked at his leg. At the tooth. At Yara. "Better than dead," he said. "Yes," Yara agreed. "It is." She took the tooth. By evening, she'd worked through fifteen of the thirty who wouldn't recover naturally. As night fell, the tally shifted, and the decision weighed more heavily than wounds. Some had anchors: wedding rings, prayer knots, a daughter's braid, a brother's knife. Those she could work with. Meaning that could be spent, shaped, turned into silver veins, and younger bones. Some didn't. For those, she looked at their faces, really looked, and saw what she'd be taking. A man with no anchor was a man who'd lose himself in the transformation. Memories scattered. Identity erased. Everything that made him who he was burned as fuel for the change. She'd done it before. In desperation. In the early days, when she didn't know better. Harry was her first failure, later reshaped with more intense magic, but all he remembered from his past life was a feeling... a phrase: “hold the gate.” He still followed her, but he was a constant reminder of what happened when you tried to fix people without meaning to anchor them. But this time, she had options. The taxes she'd collected: enchanted rings, warded amulets, sailors' charms from Tam's crew, her pirates already raiding the waterway on The Hunger , pirate talismans still humming with stored intent. Items with power but no personal meaning. Objects that could fuel the Gem without burning the person to ash. The risk was different. Cruder. The wounded would need to hold themselves together while the Gem worked. Focus on who they were. Grip their identity like a rope in a storm. Some memories would scatter anyway. Childhood mornings. A sister's laugh. The taste of their mother's cooking. Small things, lost to the hunger. But not everything. Not the self. "I can help you," she told a courier whose leg was pulp below the knee, whose pockets held nothing but lint and coins. "But you'll lose pieces. Memories. Things you'll wish you still had." He looked at her with eyes that understood. "Better