Chapter Twenty-Three #2
seemed so vast they inspired a sense of awe. He had never appreciated how large
the world truly was.
All the
same, he had to keep returning his gaze to the pebbles at his feet, because, if
he stilled himself to watch the sunset, he would find himself thinking of all
the ones he had seen from his bedroom window, and, like an anchor dragging at
his thoughts, his mind would quickly spiral into shouts and pain, the color of
blood on a sword.
He kept
kicking the pebbles. Like them, his mood felt ready to fall at the slightest
push.
After a
time, Zaria joined him at the rocky perch. The pads of her uninjured hand were
seared with burns, and she had been so sore from the day’s efforts that she had
struggled to build the lean-to where they would shelter for the night. Isaac
had used the last of his alchemical supplies to craft a liniment for her aching
muscles, and, once she sat beside him, he spent a few minutes rubbing the
herbal remedies into the skin beneath her fur. From the sounds of her grunts,
she was dissatisfied with their healing.
“Runnin’
low on rations,” she said, gnawing on a cut of salt meat. “Gonna be out long
before we hit a proper town. We’ll make it, but it’s gonna get lean. Very
lean.”
Isaac
didn’t answer. He kicked his feet against the pebbles.
“How’s
the arm?”
“Fine.”
“Workin’?”
He
shrugged. The sling dug into his shoulder.
“Don’t
mean to put you out,” she said, “but we’ll need them spells soon enough.”
His
wounds were healing at a rapid pace. The application of Soldier’s Rest had
already turned the deep punctures into a meager, shallow trench, and the burn
on his leg remained a concern only for the possibility of infection. The thing
that bothered him most was not the wounds themselves, but the idea that she had
shouldered most of the day’s labor in order to quicken his recovery. He would
feel guilty if he could not perform.
“I’ll
do my best,” he said.
“Good.
Good.”
The sun
continued to fall. Around them, the shadows stretched like knives.
“How’re
you feeling?” Zaria asked.
He tore
his gaze off the city wreckage. She was watching him with no particular
expression, save for the gentle twitch of an ear.
“It’s
hard to describe.”
“Try
it.”
He
looked out over the tomb. The words had to be extracted.
“I’ve thought
of killing my uncle before,” he said. “Many times. It wasn’t always . . . an
idle fantasy. I would be lying in bed, nursing the wounds, and I would think of
plans, imagine scenarios, try to guess how far I could make it before the Diet
or some local soldiers hunted me down.”
He
swallowed. She offered a waterskin, which was one of their last. He felt guilty
as he took a swig.
“At the
same time,” Isaac continued, “I would start thinking about my father, and I’d
hate him just as much as my uncle. I would wish he was dead, solely to free
myself. In my worst moments, I meant it with all my heart.”
He
watched the sun crest through the dunes, bathing the
sand a deep magenta.
“I
wanted to go back there. To the tower. After the chapel. . . .” He blinked.
“After I met you, I thought I’d finally worked up the courage to confront my
uncle. I was going to bring my father back to my home, and I would tell Berith
that I was leaving for good, and the phrase I had decided to say was that I
hoped he would be happy with his brother, because he had certainly never been
happy with me.”
He
rubbed the sutures on his arm.
“That
was before I saw him here. And when I did, it just . . . it happened so fast.
There wasn’t time to think, I made a decision, and—”
He kicked the pebbles, erupting a shower of scree. “And now that he’s dead, I
can’t stop thinking about the things I could’ve said. If I had spoken in a
different manner, if I had been a little more grateful, if I—”
“Isaac,”
Zaria said. “Stop. You were a child.”
“I
know.”
“You
didn’t have to do a damn thing. It’s all on him. He’s the one who did this to
you, and it ain’t your fault that brought it about.” She squeezed her fist,
wincing at the burns. “It was abuse. It was wrong.”
“I
know,” Isaac replied, looking at his lap. “I’ve always known. It’s just. . . .”
A
silence fell between them.
“Let me
ask,” Zaria said. “If you could go back, right now, go back to your home with
everything you’ve learned about him, and he was there again, same as always,
would you still have a go at his expense?”
The
answer came immediately. “Yes. I would.”
“You’d
still tell him to eat clay and fuck off?”
His
answer was a kick of the pebbles.
“There’s
hope in abuse,” Zaria said. “Hope that you’ll see that good part of them again.
Hope that you can make it stop if you just act a
little better. With people like your uncle, hope gets you nothing but pain.
It’s nothing but sand, sinking you down at every step.”
For a
moment, thunder peeled from the distance, rolling across the wreckage like a
distant, rumbling beast.
“When I
lost my father,” she said, “I was a crying mess. Spent days in the crate, all
dark and cramped. When I got taken out—well, I’m sure you’ll imagine how a
bunch of pirates treated some little girl crying about her da. I got beaten and
cut until I learned to shut my mouth. Only cried at night, when the decks were
dark, and no one could see.”
“Sounds
familiar,” Isaac said.
Zaria
leaned back on her hands, tilting her head to spy the
moons above. Solnova, the shining patriarch, was a bright yellow sphere.
Reinga, the fiery daughter, was directly in front of the larger moon, and her
shadow made a dark pupil along the face of her father. For a moment, the two
moons seemed to form an eye, watching from above.
Ulderon,
the dark son, was lost in the shadow of his father.
A
breeze rustled the bandage on Zaria’s eye.
“Only
thing that saved me was the work,” she said. “Sailing’s a hard trade. You’re
slinging rope, swabbing grit, shoring ballast. Top that with raids, boarding
action, just being hungry and scared of your fellows, and I had no time to
stand idle and be sad about things. Always busy. Always back to the struggle.”
Her
face was outlined in the light of the moons.
“One
day,” she said, “I woke up, got to scrubbing all the piss and pus from the sick
bay, and, a few hours in, I realized I hadn’t been thinking of my father at
all. Not a single thought, all that morning. Longest I’d gone since it
happened.” She flicked an ear. “Soon after, I was going whole days. Then it was
weeks, sometimes months, and now I just kinda do it here and there, whenever
something reminds me.”
In the
distance, lightning pierced the rainbow beneath the storm. The clouds were
black with rain.
“That’s
how it works, I think.” She tilted her head, giving Isaac a sideways glance.
“There’s nothing sudden. Nothing that makes the world all farts and laughter
again. You just . . . get used to them not being there. You sleep, you rise,
you keep living. The faces you think you’ll never forget—well, you do. Time
scabs them over. You move on.”
Isaac
watched the shadows grow along the shattered buildings, thinking of all the
people who used to live between their walls.
“Course,”
Zaria said, “it takes a while to get there. Sometimes, you’ll be strong. Other
times, it takes all your strength just to flop out your bunk. You’ll be going
about your business, and you’ll catch a word or smell that reminds you of home,
and it’ll cut right through your armor, and you’ll realize you’re still as raw
as the day it happened.”
She
rubbed the scar on her muzzle, tracing the line from chin to nose.
“It’s
like a tree, right? You swing an axe, just enough to leave a gash. It’ll bleed
some sap, its leaves might wither a season, but it’ll survive, and when you
come back again, it’ll still have that wound in its side, and now it’s sealed
over, and the thing’s still sucking earth and water, and, without looking too
hard, it won’t seem no different than the rest of the forest. It’s healthy
again, even with the gash. But that wound will never fade. The tree will never
forget the axe.”
The sun
had drifted below the storm, gleaming red and pale.
“You’ll
get through this,” Zaria said. “You’ll move on. You’ll keep living.”
His
voice nearly cracked. “It doesn’t feel that way.”
“It
never will, love. Not for a long time.”
He
looked down, trying to breathe.
She
shifted next to him. There was an intake of breath. After a moment, the words
became a sigh, and she began to stand. “Sorry. I’ll leave you be.”
“No,
please,” he said. “Can you. . . .”
She
blinked at him, her face covered in dirt and dust.
“Can
you just stay here?” Isaac said. “Like this?”
There
was a moment where her face fell, and she looked
pained and tired, and Isaac realized that she had likely been eager to rest in
their shelter. His improvised liniment had not been enough to soothe her aches.
His heart wrenched at the thought that he was bothering her.
“If
you’re tired. . . .”
“No,”
she said, sitting back at his side. “Sure. I’ll stay.”
“You
don’t have to.”
“Already
here.”
He
hesitated.
“What
did I say,” Zaria said, “about thinking too much?”
“Sorry.”
“I’m
right here. I mean that.”
“. . .
I know.”
They
watched the sunset. A deep red crawled through the dunes. Lightning flashed
along the distant storm. The cavern below, with all its bone and concrete and
rock, had long since fallen to shadow.
The air
was growing cold again.
Isaac
remembered the day he had left his home. He had walked across Khador’s length,
thinking the buildings seemed so much different from the mud of the street
itself, rather than the perch of his window. When he had reached the edge of
the village, he had looked back, and he had seen Berith’s tower the same way a
common man would always see it—a spire of stone and brick, perched over the
bank of a river, seeming to impale the foothills beyond. It was large and
imposing, like the man himself.
Isaac