34. Annani
ANNANI
A week ago, Annani had needed a process of elimination to decide which of the five was Khiann.
Now everyone referred to the male in the center as Khiann.
Annani walked into the converted operating room with Alena at her side and paused at the threshold, taking inventory of the five beds while forcing her heart to stop racing.
She was the Clan Mother, and despite everything, she had an image to uphold.
She could not run to Khiann and drape herself over his healing body the way she would have if there were no spectators.
That was why she always approached the other four before approaching him. Once she took his hand in hers, she did not let go until Alena told her that it was time, and it was getting harder to keep up her established routine with every passing day.
Khiann's familiar features were unmistakable now.
The high cheekbones, the long arch of his brow.
His mouth had filled in at last, his lips were no longer two deflated lines, and the finest shadow of new hair had appeared on his scalp and jaw.
Chestnut, darker than she remembered, but then it had not been exposed to the sun yet.
Even Bridget had started calling him by name, and she had been the last to give in because she had not wanted to give Annani false hope.
"Good morning, Clan Mother, Alena." Bridget came toward them with her tablet hugged to her chest, and there was excitement in her eyes that had not been there the day before. "I have news for you, and I want to deliver it in the right order, so bear with me."
Annani's heart lurched. "Is something wrong?"
"Nothing is wrong. This morning, everything is good." Bridget put a hand on her arm, which she had never done before. "I want to start with Khiann."
"Please do."
"His regeneration is outpacing the other four, and it has been since the first week. His readings are the strongest in that room by a wide margin, his tissue is rebuilding faster, and his vitals are steadier." Bridget lifted her chin toward the middle bed. "You can see for yourself."
Annani did not need to be told twice.
She crossed the room to the middle bed and looked down at her mate.
He had not changed much since yesterday, but the accumulated progress of the past week was unmistakable.
The hollows beneath his cheekbones had filled in.
The line of his jaw had come back, and with it the chestnut shadow on his skin.
His hands on the blanket had shape again, tendons and knuckles and the beginnings of the strength she remembered closing around her waist.
She took his hand between both of hers.
"Good morning, my love," she said. "I am told you are outpacing everyone. That does not surprise me in the least. You are a god. Besides, you never could stand to come in second at anything."
Behind her, Alena chuckled.
"He looks so much better," her daughter said. "Now he looks like a very handsome male taking a nap. Two weeks ago he looked like..."
"I know what he looked like." Annani caressed the back of his hand. "Do not say it out loud. He might hear you."
Bridget came to stand at the foot of the bed. "There is more."
"Of course." Annani looked up at the physician. "You said you wanted to deliver it in the right order."
"I did." Bridget slipped her tablet into her coat pocket.
"The other four started surfacing early this morning, within hours of each other.
Eye movement, finger twitches, changes in respiration.
They are not waking up yet, not in the way the word suggests, but they are on their way up. I expect them to awake fully soon."
Annani's hands went still around Khiann's.
"They are surfacing," she repeated.
"Yes."
"But Khiann is not."
"His body is ahead of theirs, Annani." Bridget said her name for the first time that morning, and she said it deliberately.
"That is a fact, and I gave it to you first because it is the one that matters most. Different systems come back online at different times.
There is no rule that says the body and the mind must surface together, and there is certainly no rule that says the strongest body surfaces first."
It was reasonable. It was kind. It had been arranged for her with obvious care, good news laid down as a foundation before the harder news was set on top of it, and Annani was grateful but not comforted.
"Can you show me?" she asked, laying Khiann's hand down on the blanket.
"Of course, Clan Mother."
She followed Bridget to the first bed.
"Look at his eyelids," Bridget said. "And wait for it."
Annani did as the physician directed and focused on the eyelids that someone had coated with lotion. Then she saw the flutter. One, two, and then nothing.
"I saw it." She turned to Bridget. "Is he waking up?"
"He is on his way."
"Mother," Alena said. "Look at his fingers."
Annani looked. The male's fingers were twitching against the blanket, small, aimless motions, but after so long of no motion at all, this was a cause for celebration.
"Thank the merciful Fates," Annani whispered.
It was time to change the stories she was telling these males. She should focus on things they knew, names they should recognize, and events they had lived through. It might jog their memories and help them surface faster.
She leaned over the male with the fluttering eyelids and spoke slowly, clearly, in the old tongue, in the accent of the world they had all lost together.
"Good morning. I am Princess Annani, daughter of Ahn, wife of Khiann.
I am the one who has been telling you stories.
You have been asleep for a very long time, and you are waking among friends. "
The eyelids fluttered, the fingers twitched, and she watched the movements, hoping to see a change, a sign of recognition. Even just a faster flutter would have been an encouraging sign.
But nothing indicated that her words had any impact, or that her name had produced any ripples.
She moved to the second bed and said it again. "I am Princess Annani, daughter of Ahn, wife of Khiann." Then again at the fourth bed, and again at the fifth, with patience and warmth, enunciating every syllable of names that had once needed no introduction anywhere in the civilized world.
Nothing. Four sleeping faces, four sets of restless eyelids, and not a single flicker of recognition among them.
She stepped back from the fifth bed and considered what the silence meant.
Annani had been the most talked-about person of the age.
The only legitimate daughter of Ahn, the heiress to his throne, the princess whose impossible love story had been the stuff of legend while she was still living it.
Every god and immortal in the region had known her.
Not only her name but also her face, the hair she had been famous for, her tiny stature that people had spoken of fondly.
These males had been Khiann's guards. They had lived in his orbit, served in his father's house, and accompanied him on more than one caravan.
If these four remembered anything at all of who they had been, they would have remembered her.
The sound of her name would have gone through them like a bell.
It hadn't.
"Give it time," Bridget said. "They've been in stasis for five thousand years. Consciousness doesn't reassemble itself overnight, and it certainly doesn't come back ready for the races. Disorientation at this stage is to be expected."
It was the correct thing for a physician to say, so Annani nodded in agreement despite knowing better.
Wonder had woken from her millennia in stasis with no name and no past, and weeks later she'd still had neither.
She had even taken her name from a human child who had called her Wonder Woman because she looked like the actress who had played that character.
Her memories had come back to her eventually, months afterward, but months was a very long time to be no one at all.
Ell-rom, who had spent even longer in stasis, had surfaced with only a handful of hazy fragments, mist where memories of his life should have been.
They had all hoped the memories would return as he healed, but they had not.
What Ell-rom had of his past, he had because Morelle had woken with her memories intact.
The twins had spent every moment of their lives together, so her memories were his, and she had filled in the blanks for him.
That was the precedent Annani could base her hopes on.
Neither Wonder nor Ell-rom had woken up completely blank.
Their intelligence had survived. Wonder had forgotten her language and her history, but she had not forgotten her resourcefulness or the ability to learn, and she had taught herself to speak Arabic and then English.
Ell-rom had not forgotten who he had been as a person, just what he had done and almost everything he had learned.
One of them had gotten his past back from his twin. The other had waited months for hers to return on its own. Neither had woken up knowing a single thing.
The four males in these beds would likely wake the same way, whole in their skills and their speech and their selves and swept clean of their life stories. They would look at the most famous face of their age and see a small, redheaded goddess they did not recognize.
She would tell them who they had been. She did not know their names or even recognize their faces, but it was possible that Esag would remember them and be able to recount some of their individual histories.
She, at least, could tell them about the world they had lived in and what had happened to them.
They would join her clan, and the community would wrap them in warmth and acceptance like it did almost every newcomer.
They would be fine. They were waking.
Annani walked back to the middle bed, the third in a row of five, and looked at her mate.
His monitors retained their old rhythm. The deep, even, unvarying metronome, breath after identical breath, heartbeat after identical heartbeat, the sounds that had faded into the background because they never changed.
His eyelids were still, glistening from the lotion the medical staff had applied, and his fingers lay motionless on the blanket exactly where she had set them down.
And his face, his beautiful, strong face, with its chestnut shadow and its familiar mouth, slept on without a flicker while his guards climbed toward the light.
The strongest body in the room. The best readings. The fastest regeneration.
And the only one of the five who was not coming up.
"You said there is no rule," Annani said quietly, without turning around. "Tell me what you believe, Bridget. Not what you can prove."
Bridget came to stand beside her. "I believe he is going to wake up.
I believe he is taking longer because he is a god, because none of us has ever done this to a god before, and because five thousand years is a very long time.
" She paused. "I also believe that you are terrified, and that nothing I say this morning is going to change that. "
"No," Annani admitted. "It is not."
What if he did not wake at all?
She had read of humans who slipped under because of a terrible injury or illness and never surfaced, sleeping on for years while their families kept vigil, while their bodies curled and withered and finally, mercifully, died.
But Khiann would not wither. Khiann was a god.
His body would remain perfect, radiating health and beauty for endless years, while there was no one home.
A sleeping prince in a tale with no spell to break.
She could sit beside him and hold his warm hand until the sun burned out and still it would never once close around hers.
The prophecy , a small voice whispered in the back of her mind. The prophecy promised you two more children .
Usually, remembering the words of the blind seer was enough to restore Annani's spirits, but today the fear was roaring too loudly in her ears for her to hear whispers.
"Mother?" Alena touched her arm. "Would you like to sit?" She motioned at the chair that was now a permanent fixture next to Khiann's bed.
Not trusting her voice, Annani nodded and sat down.
She arranged her skirt, took Khiann's hand between both of hers, the hand with real flesh on it now, still thin but warm and beautifully made, and she looked at his sleeping face and began to silently pray.
This was between her and the Fates, and she addressed them formally.
Dear merciful Fates, you have taken so much from me.
You have taken my one truelove mate, my family, and my entire people, but you have given me a prophecy, delivered by a blind human seer with second sight, and by doing so you have given me the strength to start anew.
You have given me my children, who formed a clan, and in exchange, I carried on the work of my people as best I could, standing against the evil of darkness and bringing light to this world.
Do not forsake me now that I am so close to reclaiming the one I love.
I know that every gift requires a sacrifice, and although I have already sacrificed more than most, I am willing to sacrifice yet more.
Let Khiann wake. Let him wake whole with his mind and his sense of self intact. Let him wake up as Khiann and not someone else, and if the price you demand is his memories of me, I am willing to pay it.
Accept my bargain, and I promise to keep bringing light to the world. Deny it, and the light would go out because I would lose the will to keep fighting.
It is not a threat. I would never dare. It is just a statement of fact.
I am tired. I have been fighting for five thousand years, and every two steps forward I was dragged one step back by the forces of evil.
I am at the end of my rope, and I need Khiann back, with or without his memories, but whole.
I will keep the memories for him and remind him of our first kiss, our wedding, and every morning of the short, blazing months we had together. I will court him again.
I courted him once against every expectation the world had of me, and I won him with nothing but stubbornness, and I am far more stubborn now than I was then.
I will be the petite stranger with flaming red hair who visits him and tells him wonderful stories, and I will make him fall in love with me again, counting myself the most blessed being who has ever lived.
We are fated mates. You made us so. I refuse to believe the bond died, because I have carried my half of it for five thousand years, and it is still warm. Let him wake, and it will find him.
His life for his memories of me. That is my bargain.