Chapter Loud
Loud
I
’m floating.
I don’t realize what’s happening until my back hits the ground. Air knocks from my lungs.
My blood drips onto the dirt.
I stare at the stars.
Is this it? Is this my death?
Will I see Ma soon?
“No,” the boy hisses. “You will not!”
Muffled words make it through my moment of silence. It’s my name she screams. I glance down. Calista is tying something around my wound—the sleeve of her shirt.
“You’ll heal yourself,” she whispers.
No, she doesn’t whisper. My ears are clogged with rushing blood.
“Wendy! That is a command. Heal yourself!”
I don’t respond.
“Listen to her,” the boy says. “She wants the best for you.”
A hand grips my cheek harshly, shaking my head.
“Do you hear me?” Calista picks up my one gloved hand, unbuttoning it for me. I jerk up, all instinct. She tears the leather from my hand. She knows not to touch, even now.
My bare hands settle over the wound. It feels like touching a ghost. Which part isn’t real? My hands or the wound? It’s as if the boy connects to me now. As if his hands are guiding me.
He doesn’t have hands.
They hold me anyways.
“The wound will stitch itself together,” he says. “You can heal the rest later. You must get out of the woods, first.”
It’s not my energy that fuels me. It’s not my magic that heals me. It isn’t me that forces myself to live—it’s the boy.
Tears well in my eyes as the green energy falls from my hands, like a waterfall of smoke. I don’t know why I cry.
It isn’t mine.
They are Calista’s tears.
There are very few.
I’ve only ever felt the magic of mending through other people. I’ve never mended myself. It’s like a circle. It’s like infinity. There is no ending or beginning. It is me meeting me.
I am the whole world.
And for once, the world heals me.
?
My arms hang heavy as I walk back to the academy, Calista beside me. She hasn’t said a word, and if she had, it wouldn’t have been a pleasant one.
My wound feels taut, stretched thin. I’ll sleep it off. If I need more healing, I can go to the infirmary.
I try to make it to my room, but with every step, the feeling I fought off earlier grows stronger.
It isn’t anything concrete. I thought it would go away after I killed the moonaro, but nothing has changed.
Dread coils in my gut, like something alive is chewing its way through me, the same way rot hollows out fruit.
It feels vaguely familiar, as if I felt it before and know what it means, but I fail to place it.
I’m too tired to place it.
I let the rot eat me. It doesn’t change much—I already feel hollow.
My feet hit the beige floor of the academy, and I turn toward my room. Something grabs my arm, trying to pull me in the other direction.
I fight against their strength, but they don’t cease. Finally, I turn around, prepared to push the person away.
Nobody’s there.
But somebody is. I feel them before me. Holding out a hand, I reach for the ghost, assuming it’s a Nepenthe—the only creature who can use invisibility magic.
There’s nothing there.
But there is.
“What are you doing?” Calista calls.
The hand that clamps around my wrist lets go. I look ahead, waiting.
Unsure of what I’m doing.
“Wendy?”
“I don’t know,” I murmur.
“Well come on.” Calista steps closer.
I shake my head. This isn’t right. I’m not supposed to leave.
There’s something I need to see.
I glance down at the rot eating through my body.
“You need rest,” she says.
My heart aches, telling me to turn and follow her, so I do.
A few steps later, I realize I followed because of her concern. She worries for me and my wound.
But my worry lingers with the ghost, in the opposite direction.
?
Calista takes me to my room and settles me in bed. She even places the cover over my body.
I keep waiting for her to leave; she waiting, too. There’s a wall between us, one she doesn’t want to cross. I don’t blame her. I know why.
“You could go to the infirmary.” She lingers by the door. “Get extra healing.”
“I’m all right.”
I’m not all right. But this pain—this hollowing of my heart—is not from the mended stab wound. It’s an discomfort that aches. It’s a shepherd, and I’m a sheep—I have to follow it.
Calista turns to exit, but she isn’t ready to leave. Her back stays turned to me, her hand on the knob, for several moments.
Finally, she faces me.
“Thank you,” she mutters.
There are words on the tip of my tongue, and I almost say them for her. Before I can act on her impulse, she spins again, walking out of the room.
I watch her go, the door closing.
The residue of her sticks to my skin for several minutes. Then, I sink back into my body. My feeling.
And I can’t deny there’s something wrong.
Again and again, I reach for my heart, my torso. If I were less exhausted, I’d examine the feeling. But I’m not even sure it’s mine, and I can’t bother with other people at the moment.
Yet it feels so familiar.
Not familiar in the way that my heart and stomach hurt. Familiar in the way my legs once hurt.
I reach for them, surprised when my hand meets my knee cap. I expected it not to be there. For my legs to be gone… the same way I expect my stomach to be a gaping wound. I keep looking down, waiting.
But there’s nothing to wait for, not anymore. It’s already happened.
I sit up.
This is a metaphorical dismemberment, I realize. I understand exactly what’s happening.
The hollowing, the pain, the rot.
It’s something I hoped to never feel again, always knowing I’d never be so lucky.
My feet slam against the floor, and I rise, running out of the suite. I turn corner after corner of the academy halls. I don’t have enough hope to fight against the certainty that claws at my chest.
The halls are dark, darker so as I turn the last corner, not believing what my eyes are showing me.
It’s a dream—it’s the boy in my mind. I must have closed my eyes. It’s a figment of my imagination.
It’s sick.
But it’s not real.
But if it’s only in my mind, if it’s only the boy, why do I feel the impact of the marble floor when it meets my knees, reverberating through my bones like I’ve broken them?
Why do the sobs feel so real, like a stone lodged in my chest, fighting its way out?
“Tell me this isn’t real,” I beg the boy. “Please tell me I’ve lost it. I’m sorry for what I said.”
“I cannot,” is his only answer.
In front of me is a bloody mess. A hole in his chest, my heart punched out.
There he is, the only boy I’ve ever loved. Azaire’s usually red cheeks, blanched. His usually smiling mouth, red.
“No,” I think I say out loud. I drag my body across the floor. “No, no, no.”
I pull Azaire’s body from Lucian’s lap and onto mine. I touch his snakes, trying to fill them with life. I caress his face, trying to fill him with color.
I try to suck the life from anything around me. I try to give it to him. If I can bring a figment of my imagination to life, can’t I save him?
I have to save him.
Nothing happens, and all I feel is death.
Azaire stills wears the rose amulet. Azaire wears the amulet on his chest and is dead despite it. My trembling hand hovers above the pendant, trying to touch it, but I cannot bring myself to.
The stinger of a fatta scorpion rests beside Lucian. The poisonous stinger. The kind that kills a soul.
I glance back at Azaire, worrying he is too far gone.
“How long?” I plead.
“It’s too late,” Lucian answers.
No. It can’t be—he can’t be gone, not so permanently. Nothing can kill energy, nothing except for the fatta’s stinger. Nothing can eradicate a person, nothing but what’s happened to Azaire.
I gave him the rose—I tried to protect him, and somehow the worst has happened.
“I won’t accept that,” I mutter, picking up one side of Azaire’s limp body.
I have to fix this; I have to save him. Give him life or, at the very least, protect his soul.
Lucian lifts the other side of Azaire, and I carry him, trying not to let my emotions muddle with feelings of Ma. Feelings of anything.
But I can’t help myself from wondering if this is what Pa felt when he came to the garden and saw his wife dead, half of her body buried in the ground like a plant.
Tears fall. Burning flesh reeks in the distance, and I don’t know if it’s real. Is it a manifestation of my emotions?
Is this the boy, showing me my worst fears come true? The darkest parts of myself?
“It’s not me,” he answers. “This is very real.”
“I don’t want it to be.”
“I know, love. I can help. Just close your eyes.”
I do, because I can’t imagine doing anything else. But what I see is the field where Ma died. I wiggle away immediately, hoping to free myself from this. The boy holds my hand tightly.
“This isn’t where it began,” he says. “But it is where it solidified. In the aftermath.”
He points to two bodies: my body and Ma’s—alive. Ma steps in front of me, pushing me back.
“Wendy, run,” she demands.
My fourteen-year-old self shakes her head no. She trembles with fear, but she doesn’t run. No, she wants to help.
She doesn’t realize she will do the opposite.
Ma’s arms rise, summoning the trees that surround her. She used them to fight the pernipe, just as I had with the kapha.
I hadn’t noticed back then, but hers is the stance of a warrior. There is comfort in her power.
Yet, no matter how many blows she lands, the pernipe continues moving. And when it rushes for me, Ma screams. “Run!”
My younger self freezes. I want to turn away—I know what happens next—but my mind won’t let me.
The boy won’t let me.
Ma holds the pernipe off until she can’t. At the hands of the pernipe’s magic, she sinks into the world, her legs becoming roots. The pernipe throws my younger self through the air. I land against a tree, the memory going dark.
I don’t see the rest; I don’t know the rest. All I see is younger me, waking up with a face full of blood. Red pours from the wound at my lip, now a scar.
Tears form in my younger self’s eyes—trying to wane off the sting of the blood. She wipes her face, searching for answers, searching for what happened.
Then she wishes she hadn’t.