Chapter Twenty-Four Fenlia
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Fenlia
Fen reaches Crowen a week after Adalei’s meeting with parliament. She and Cieli rode as hard and as fast as they could, stopping only to help those in need along the road. The plague is spreading, and the symptoms are getting worse the longer the people remain unattended.
The city gates are closed when they arrive, but after a few words with the city guard, they are let in and directed to a makeshift quarantine zone that has already been established.
Elena Morsen meets them as they enter a hastily constructed walled-off section of the city. The physician breathes a clear sign of relief, and Fen hurries to embrace her old mentor. ‘How are you doing?’ she asks. ‘Are you sick?’
‘I’m fine, dear,’ Elena replies. ‘If I fall sick, then I’ll trust someone to help me in my time of need, but for now – I’m committed to doing what I can to help.
Now, come: Zinnitzia arrived about four hours ago with some Reapers and volunteers from Altas.
She’s trying to help them get along with the Givers from Kreuzfurt…
but it doesn’t seem to be going very well. ’
‘They’re not willing to help?’
‘No, it’s not that…language barriers mostly. Not many of the Givers even speak Lunae, and the Reapers themselves don’t seem to fully understand what they’re supposed to do in the first place.’
‘I can help with that,’ Cieli offers. Fen hastily makes introductions as Elena leads them to Zinnitzia.
The quarantine zone is a mess. Not quite a slum, but very quickly deteriorating from a lack of care and attention.
People line the streets, anxious and uncertain.
They look back and forth between each other with varying degrees of suspicion.
Black marks streak their skin. Many faces are flushed and dripping with sweat, each trying to say they are worse off than the person in front of them and therefore need care more swiftly than all the rest. City guards are trying to keep them organized and calm, but it is not an easy business.
Fen squeezes by, holding on to Elena’s arm to keep from getting separated.
Cieli, for once, actively works to keep her skin covered and her deadly touch to herself, doing her very best to avoid any accidental murders along their road.
Even so, once they duck into the building where the Exalted are apparently headquartered, Fen catches a look of contempt crossing Cieli’s features.
She seems to be sneering at the lack of organization, the mess.
‘Was there truly no better way to construct this…quarantine? These people seem to be sleeping on the streets.’
‘It could be worse,’ Fen says.
‘It could be much better too,’ Elena replies.
‘Plague aside, leaving them all out on the streets like this is an excellent way to ensure cross-infection.’ Then, to Cieli, she swears: ‘I’m working on it.
’ She hurries them along, guiding them into what appears to be a former butcher’s building.
There are fenced-off areas where cattle used to be brought prior to slaughter and an entranceway that leads inside, where a high, bloodstained counter separates one side of the room from the other.
Cots have been strewn throughout. Zinnitzia has gathered four Reaper and Giver pairs towards the back.
Assorted plain-clothed volunteers loiter around the edges, not seeming to know what to do with themselves as Zinnitzia coaches the Exalted.
Her hair is a mess, her face is covered in sweat, and there is dirt marring her palms, brow and knees.
Zinnitzia looks up when they arrive, says something sharp to the poor girl in white robes at her side, then goes to meet them.
‘Come, there’s an office we can use,’ she says without proper greeting.
She turns on her heel and takes them to the other side of the counter and then up a flight of stairs.
Zinnitzia opens a door to a tiny room that barely fits the desk and its accumulated missives, let alone the four of them.
She sits on the corner of the desk rather than trying to squeeze around it to the other side.
Her eyes go to Fen and Cieli, looking them over.
‘What does our princess have to say?’ she asks.
Fen tells her. She does not like what Adalei suggested, but now is neither the time nor place to ignore that order; Adalei has made it perfectly clear that she will remove people from their positions of power if they do not agree with her methodology.
Still, Fen hopes Zinnitzia will reject the idea herself.
That she will have Crowen close its gates properly, rather than only enforcing a restricted quarantine for new travellers and those already ill.
But instead, Zinnitzia accepts the orders with no complaint.
She asks if Elena is prepared to take a gaggle of individuals who have never needed to think about what to do with a sick body before and manage them into some kind of nursing corp.
Elena agrees without question, puffing up her chest and looking more fierce than anything Fen has seen before.
‘I have some thoughts on potentially trying for an inoculation too,’ she confesses.
‘It’s not a viral ailment – I’m not sure if such a thing would make much of a difference. It may very well simply lead to more people getting sick,’ Zinnitzia warns. ‘And you won’t be able to test on animals – they have never been affected by this plague.’
‘I take matters of medical ethics very seriously, Zinnitzia. I won’t make any suggestions or actions that are inappropriate. Though I am curious, how is the disease contracted in the first place? I’ve been trying to source the method but—’
‘It’s the wind.’
‘The…wind? It is airborne then?’
‘No.’ Zinnitzia presses a hand to her face.
She rubs at her eyes, exhaustion evident.
‘Or at least not in the traditional sense. So long as there is someone, somewhere, who is out of balance with the world they live in – the wind will carry that feeling, that sensation, to the next person it can reach. Those barricades, in truth, help maintain a measure of hope, but they may not be entirely effective. No, Fen, that does not mean we should close the gates entirely; I know you think that’s what we should do, and we still won’t do it.
But those barricades do only slightly mitigate the risk to the rest of the city. ’
‘What does it mean, though,’ Elena presses on, ‘to be out of balance?’
‘Do you know, Elena? I wonder very much if you will ever catch this plague,’ Zinnitzia muses, before saying: ‘It’s a balance, both internally and…
shall we say spiritually, mentally, when it comes to who and what we are as living creatures on this earth.
The more we strain for life, the more we fail.
I won’t explain more now, it won’t make much sense even if I do.
But, tell me, Reaper,’ she says next to Cieli.
‘What does it feel like to kill this plague?’
‘It felt like squishing bugs,’ the Reaper replies.
Zinnitzia laughs. ‘Marina said much the same thing a long time ago, a line of ants one after another. Endless ants on an endless parade, where each one had to be stamped on individually before moving to the next.’
‘Yes, but the ants have no shape. They are…invisible ants,’ Cieli continues. She sounds and looks terribly uncertain still.
Fen cannot help but think of the stark differences between helping Cat in Altas and what she and Cieli did for the refugees along the road.
‘When Cat did it, it felt like…he had revealed a great well that just needed to be filled with water,’ she tries to explain.
She felt his touch in every person Elician allowed her to reach, and she only needed to gently bring the equilibrium back to where it belonged.
Cat drained the well of all its excess and she made it right. ‘And Marina…it wasn’t like that.’
‘Marina already knows this illness. But for Cat…by now, Fen, you’d think you’d have realized just how truly exceptional our dear stello actually is.
’ Zinnitzia sneers. ‘Elician too, for that matter. Out of curiosity, what was the reaction in court to this plague?’ When Fen tells her, she sighs.
‘Perhaps it’s for the best they’re more focused on chasing their prejudice once again… ’
‘They were almost calling for Cat’s head. Adalei had three lords stripped of their titles—’
‘But they haven’t realized yet it was Elician,’ Zinnitzia intercedes.
‘What do you imagine they will do when they realize this is all Elician’s fault?
It was his power that allowed those pendants to work in the first place, ensuring an undying army could march all through Alelune to Altas with their Reaper slaves ready to do battle against those unable to protect themselves.
He’s the one who continued to resurrect Lio time and again.
He’s the one that brought all of Altas back to life.
He upset the balance between life and death from the very start, and now here we are.
If he had not resurrected anyone at all, as I told him time and again – we never would have been here.
And sooner or later, the court will realize that themselves.
’ She says the last bit so quietly that she is certain the words won’t carry outside their room, but the hair on the back of Fen’s neck stands on end and a cold sweat breaks out across her skin as she waits for a startled shout of confusion or any sign that someone could be listening.
‘It’s not…’ she tries to argue, but Zinnitzia, like Marina before her, is uncompromising.
‘We all warned him what resurrection would do, what the consequences would be. He did it anyway.’
‘Why aren’t there any consequences if a Reaper slaughters an entire city then?’ Fen spits out. And Zinnitzia laughs.