I t took many hours for Tisaanah to fall into a restless sleep. I lay there with her, not tired, curled around her naked body. As she slept, I took
inventory of her injuries—the crooked fingers, the wounds, the new scars across the top of her shoulder blades. Six neat squares.
They had fucking flayed her.
When I saw that, I regretted giving Lady Zorokov a quick death. Fuck morality. She should have burned.
I peered at Tisaanah’s face. She had cried so much that even in sleep, her eyes were red rimmed. I kissed her on the cheek and was careful not to wake her when I got out of bed. If she woke, I knew that she would immediately fling herself back outside to work, and it had been difficult enough just to get her to rest for a few hours.
Riasha and Tisaanah had spearheaded the initial recovery efforts, and though everything was still a mess of rubble, it was beginning to look more like a settlement and less like a battlefield. The recovered bodies burned beyond the edges of the city. The rebels had secured wine from the inside of the Zorokovs’ palace, and though it was midday, the streets were full of drunken partying—one part funeral reception, one part freedom celebration, one part exhausted release.
I found Sammerin in a house not far from the one that Tisaanah and I were staying in, which he and another healer had formed into a makeshift hospital. He sat on a bench outside, head tipped back to rest against the outer wall, smoking.
“You look horrific,” I said.
“Thank you. So do you.” He let out a long puff of smoke and regarded me up and down. “Though fairly unremarkable looking for someone who has now ended three different wars under strange and mysterious circumstances.”
I gave him a smile and a very polite, “Fuck you.” I took a seat on the bench beside him, and he offered me his pipe, which I declined.
“That’s terrible for your health, you know,” I said.
“Oh? Is it?” Sammerin gave me a deadpan glare and took another defiant puff.
I nodded to the door. “How’re things in there?”
“About what one would expect.” He glanced at a group of people nearby who wielded half-broken instruments to make joyously horrible music. “Big contrast between out here and in there.”
“Victory is expensive.”
Sammerin let out a scuff of a laugh, like this was a cruelly funny joke— and it was, wasn’t it?
For so many, today was the happiest day of their lives. For others, the most tragic.
I looked down at my hands. They hadn’t stopped shaking since the battle. The pads of my fingertips tingled, like they still felt the remnants of the heart’s magic.
I swallowed past a lump in my throat and shook away the image of those rearranged bodies.
“How’s Tisaanah?” Sammerin asked.
I didn’t know how to answer that. “She’s… alive.” “Oof.”
“Right.” I rubbed my temple. “She’s resting.”
“She’ll be furious when she realizes that you didn’t wake her up.” “She’ll get over it.”
He gave me a look that said, Really? Will she?
I shrugged. “Someone’s got to keep her from working herself to death.” “Maybe that’s how she wants to go.”
He only sounded like he was half-joking, and the image of Serel curled up in his grief flashed through my mind and refused to leave. I felt a little sick, because it was too close to being true. I knew what it was like to place no value in your own life. I knew it well enough to see that in Tisaanah— the fact that she’d be willing to sacrifice everything, anything, for her cause.
I couldn’t make those kinds of jokes today.
“You might want to go see Brayan,” Sammerin said, mercifully changing the topic. “He seems a little lost.”
An unsupervised Brayan was never a good thing.
I found him helping to clear some rubble in the back of the city. He, like everyone else, looked tired.
“Congratulations,” he said, when he saw me. “You’re a hero. Again.”
My stomach turned. Hero. Sure. How come that word was only applied to me when a bunch of people were dead? I wanted to say, Are we looking at the same city?
He said, “Now I understand.” “What?”
“How you could do it.” At my confused stare, he touched the corner of his eye. “This. I noticed your eyes were different. I didn’t realize why.”
“I… it’s…” One would think by now I’d have a better way of describing it. “The Orders did it to me, during the Ryvenai War.”
“Hm.” He awkwardly looked away. Brayan had never been comfortable with the existence of my magic, and this only made it more difficult for him to understand. He preferred a straightforward world.
He cleared his throat and changed the subject. “Has Nura been found?” “No. She’s either dead and buried somewhere beneath wreckage, or she
escaped, or…”
Or captured. I hoped she was dead. If she wasn’t, what was coming next would be worse.
Brayan continued to pick through the broken planks of wood. “I went after her,” he said. “During the invasion. She asked me to join her, again.”
I stopped moving and turned back to him. “And?”
Brayan looked at me like I was stupid. “Obviously, I didn’t. But she said something… strange.” He furrowed his brow and turned back to his work. “She said something about that day. She said that I didn’t know what they had died for.” The wrinkle deepened. “What do you think that means? It’s such an odd thing to say. Do you think we missed something?”
He sounded hopeful. Fucking hopeful.
“Nura would say anything, if she thought it would help Ara,” I said, carefully. “She’s desperate.”
Brayan’s face hardened, but then he sighed. “You’re right.”
It was probably the only time in thirty years that Brayan had uttered those words to me, and it was… because of this.
I couldn’t bring myself to even look at him for a long moment. When I finally did, he was staring into the distance in deep, serious thought.
“You know…” He frowned. “I’ve never fought with anyone like this before.”
“Like this?”
“People who are… well, really fighting for something.” He jabbed his thumb to a cluster of dancers further down the street, and his mouth quirked in an almost-smile. “I never saw that after one of my Roseteeth victories.”
Despite myself, I chuckled. “The great Brayan Farlione, discovering the heart beneath the warfare. Who would have thought?”
That fleeting smirk disappeared, replaced with a disapproving shake of the head. He turned back to his work, and I decided to quit while I was ahead.
 |
LATER, I checked back in on Serel in Tisaanah’s stead. He was no longer asleep, now perched on the edge of his bed. His arm was in a sling— Sammerin had had to heal it in phases since it was a complex break. He simply sat in the dark, in silence, completely still.
When I opened the door to see this, I apologized and backed away.
“No,” he said, giving me a weak smile. “Come.” He spoke in poor Aran.
“Just seeing how you are,” I said, in Thereni, and his smile grew slightly.
“Your Thereni is better, you know. I meant to say that earlier.” I scoffed. “Only a small bit.”
“Tisaanah probably only taught you the bad words.”
This was true. I tried my best Thereni approximation of, “Fuck yes she did,” which earned a hoarse chuckle from Serel.
“I don’t think that particular curse means what you think it does.”
I was willing to be the butt of the joke, if that’s what it took to earn that raspy laugh.
“Do you need anything?” I asked him.
“No, thank you. I’m fine.” “You do not need to be.”
“There are things more important than my grief right now.”
For a moment, I had to marvel at him. All I could think was that if it was Tisaanah, I would have been crawling my way to the top of the nearest tower to hurl myself off of it. Absolutely nothing in this world or any other would be more important than my grief.
“The hurt will still stay,” I said, in choppy Thereni. “Even if you hide
it.”
A wave of sadness passed over Serel’s face, and he went to the window. “I know.” He looked down at the celebrations below. “But at least they
have a future.”
“You do, too,” I said, and Serel was silent.
“It’s strange,” he murmured. “It doesn’t feel that way. I don’t know what a future without him looks like.”
I was at a loss for words. I had to switch to Aran. “It will take time, but you’ll build another version of that future, Serel.”
He looked at me over his shoulder and gave me a wry, sad smile. “Would you?”
No. Of course the answer was no. If Tisaanah was gone, my future would be too. A simple truth.
I was quiet. I had no more platitudes to offer Serel. No more comfort. “It’s alright,” he said, quietly, turning back to the window. “The dream
was worth it.”
