Chapter Ten Fenlia #2
Another soldier charges in; Marina tackles him to the ground, grappling until she has him pinned. ‘Rodans, can you hold them?’ she asks.
‘Yes, ma’am!’ he shouts in return, holding his position as Marina keeps her grip firm on the soldier’s body.
‘Help me,’ she orders Fen. Marina is searching for something; Fen doesn’t know what.
Marina pulls back the soldier’s uniform and a flailing limb tries to stop her, but Fen pins it down.
There is nothing of note. Armour, simple armour.
Padded outerwear, lighter inner layers. A chain around the soldier’s neck with some terribly ugly bauble and—
‘The necklace,’ Cat shouts. Marina snaps the chain. She pulls it loose, and the soldier slumps beneath her at long last. The chain is unremarkable. But its pendant is something else. It is a strange, twisted leather ball, held together with thick black string.
Cat is right.
Fen can feel it.
A Giver’s power. A constant flow of energy repeating the same tremulous command in every variation there is: Come back.
Heal. Be whole. And she knows this power.
Knows this sensation. Cat was wrong too.
For it is Elician. As if someone has taken her brother and reduced every ounce of his magic into a pendant that fits in the palm of her hand.
She looks up. There’s another Alelunen soldier. Another chain around their neck. Rodans is fighting with him, blocking and defending to the best of his ability. She holds out her hand. And she wills that damnable necklace to burn.
Fire careens around the soldier’s neck. Rodans yelps and ducks back, but then the moment the necklace tears free, the soldier he was fighting howls in agony.
Rodans stabs him. The body falls. It stays down.
Marina shouts something, but Fen can’t hear it.
She sees it. Every time an Alelunen soldier falls, they rise.
A Soleben infantryman hits the ground to her right and Fen reaches for him without thinking.
She brings him back while still holding that ugly pendant in her hand, and she watches him lurch to his feet and jump back into the fray. Another body falls. Her fingers flex.
It’ll go on for ever, Fen realizes dully.
No one will live or die, not really. We’re going to keep slashing and hacking at each other until the end of time.
Until there is nothing left to do but keep brandishing our weapons or stop for the night.
It will be an endless war replaying itself over and over again in its final form: a symphony of air that never quite feels satisfied with moving forward or staying still.
This is why the gods have forbidden Reapers and Givers from battlefields. We have no place here.
Fen’s fingers clench tight around the necklace in her hand. She reaches out. She traces it. That feeling. That sensation. There is a necklace being worn by every single member of this army, and she does the one thing she does best: she tells them all to burn.
Fire bursts into existence, searing metal and flesh.
One soldier after another. Elician had shouted at her.
He had asked her if she was ready for what it sounded like, smelled like, to burn a human alive.
She thought he was overreacting. But the screams. The screams and the noxious scent of flesh charring under the will of her power alone – it is indescribable.
Tears well in her eyes. Her stomach churns and squeezes – but she presses on, melting every single pendant she can find. The soldiers are dropping. One right after another. Their desperate hands slap down at their throats, trying to put out the flames she has called into existence.
Each destroyed pendant releases a cool burst of energy that flutters against the back of her mind.
Familiar. So familiar. Elician at the height of his ability, his endless strength and possibility and promise.
Marina grabs at a still-burning man who forsook attacking her in favour of desperately trying to put out his burning chest. Her skin graces his cheek.
He crumples in an instant, dead. He does not come back.
The last pendant is scorched, and as soon as it melts, Cat puts out every fire and does what he wanted to do from the start: he makes it so not a single member of the Alelunen army, or the Reapers who came with them, can move.
The soldiers wail. It must hurt to be burned within their own armour. Fen finds no sympathy for any of them in her heart. Cat sinks to his knees. ‘I can’t…hold them for ever,’ he grinds out.
‘Take the soldiers into custody!’ Lio yells, circling his horse around Elician’s and leaping off it to land at Cat’s side.
Fen doesn’t understand how he managed to keep his seat through all the chaos.
Elician is still sitting on his horse too, oblivious to everything.
He has not moved, has not spoken. Hasn’t even looked to his husband, crumpled on the ground, where Lio is tending to him.
‘Hey, hey, look at me. Are you all right?’ Lio holds Cat by his shoulders, careful not to touch his skin but so close to the threat of death.
‘Just do it,’ Cat grinds out. ‘Fast.’
There are bodies strewn across the ground.
They came with five hundred men. There may have been more than a hundred Reapers, but the Alelunen soldiers counted only a few dozen.
Even so, they had killed so many Solebens simply for the fact they themselves had not been able to die.
Fen’s jaw clenches. The remaining Soleben forces furiously approach their collapsed enemies.
Fen reaches for the nearest body to bring back from the dead. A woman whose face was shattered and her jaw unaligned. Her fingers are almost at the woman’s brow when the soldier gasps. Fen recoils. This is a Soleben soldier. She has no necklace around her neck, but – ‘That’s Elician,’ Cat gasps.
And it is different.
So different.
Where the necklaces cast a sensation not unlike a battering ram filled with ruthless, single-minded determination, this resurrection is softer.
Kinder. Gentler. The soldier’s jaw is set back into position.
Her bones heal. Her eyes clear and she stares up at the sky with a look of stupefied wonder on her face, slowly raised from the dead rather than torn from her grave with all the rushing delicacy of a door slammed open in the morning.
Fen helps her sit up. She looks around. It is all the same.
Body after body. Twitching, gasping, rolling back into their hands and knees.
Life blossoming like the first brush of spring.
The pendants the Alelunen soldiers had worn felt exactly like her brother.
Fen sensed that the moment she held one in her palm.
But they were his wrath. His anger, his sorrow.
As if he screamed the words into being. Each come back which had been demanded by the pendant’s influence offset by a furious wellspring of despair.
There is no wrath now. No pain. No frustration. Only hope. Desire. A deep, burning love for his people. A love more powerful than Death herself. He brings his people back to life. He heals their wounds. He brings them home.
There is no denying who and what he is. All eyes are on him as each soldier realizes what he is doing and why they owe him their lives.
He is the taboo they have always been warned of: a Giver king on the throne of Soleb, raising scores of the dead by his will alone.
And they would not be here, alive still, if he were anything else.
It is not merely a return of the dead, though.
Injuries begin to heal. Broken bones are set right, slashed skin knitting back together.
‘Fuck me…’ Marina curses. Fen follows her gaze.
The city gate is open, and there are people moving, people stumbling and walking, people tripping over themselves.
Leaving the city. Watching what is happening outside. ‘Are they…?’
‘Altasians.’ Cat mangles the word as he says it. He slips and slides over the vowels and consonants as he leans forward and rests his head on Lio’s shoulder.
Fen goes to him. She kneels at his side and takes him from Lio and into her arms. Blood gushes down his face.
It seems to be sweating from his skin. ‘Stop talking,’ Fen commands him.
She presses her hand to his cheek, right where his scar used to be.
She wills him to heal, wills his energy returned to him.
Elician may be able to bring the dead back to life and heal the living, but healing Cat is something that she is better at.
She heals that which is thought of as dead. And she does it very well.
In Kreuzfurt, the ill felt as if they were composed of sand. They were made of tiny, indeterminable particles, and any one of those particles could be the illness or ailment that they wanted fixed. Any one of those grains of sand could be what needed to be amended.
But Cat is a shattered porcelain plate, long, jagged edges that slide smoothly back into position.
All she needs to do is find the break and reattach it where it was once whole.
Cat’s tear ducts, which burst under the pressure of his power, his eardrums which ruptured as he put every ounce of his energy into stopping the Reapers from rampaging through their men, his throat which was torn raw by the sheer desperation of his attempt.
She heals it all, one piece after another. Sections slide together, invisible breaks shimmering with the golden touch of life as it seeps in between the parts that make up his body. Making him whole.
She pulls away, and when she does, Cat blinks up at her. He murmurs something she does not quite catch. His hand pats hers gently.
Elician sways on his horse. Lio stands. He braces Elician in his saddle. ‘That’s enough,’ he says. The battlefield is still. Under control. They’ve done everything they needed to do. The fight is over. ‘Elician, that’s enough.’
Fen’s brother does not seem to hear him. She can still feel that constant thread of energy swirling through the air, across her skin. Power beyond what she had dreamed him or any Giver capable of.
‘Elician,’ Cat calls. ‘Stop.‘ Elician’s fingers twitch. His head lists in Cat’s direction. ‘That’s everyone. I don’t sense anyone else who is dead.’
‘Oh.’ Elician breathes in time with the rest of them.
He blinks, as if coming back to himself at long last. ‘All right.’ Then he pitches off his horse into Lio’s outstretched arms. Lio barely braces the fall, guiding Elician down to the ground as he struggles with the weight.
Fen reaches towards them both. Her hand rests against her brother’s cheek.
He is fine. Unconscious and exhausted but fine.
Whole. Lio defended him well. Not a single blade or attack reached Elician in all the time he sat unmoving at the centre of the melee.
Cat stands with Marina’s help.
It’s over, Fen realizes.
‘Did you know he could do that?’ Rodans asks at Fen’s side.
‘No,’ Fen replies. She hadn’t known anyone could do that.
Noise erupts from the city.
Cheers.
It echoes over the city walls and surrounds all of them with a sound of joy and bewildered disbelief. Fen closes her eyes and feels the world breathe. Everyone within riding distance of Altas is alive.