Chapter 20 Nasrin
NASRIN
Icame to awareness slowly, wondering how the hell I’d gotten kicked by a horse on Zaphrinax.
I cracked open bleary, burning eyes, my tongue fused to the roof of my mouth.
It took too much effort to try to move my tongue and speak, so I moved my eyes instead.
Although even this proved to be something I couldn’t handle for long, pain clanging through my head like a gong.
But I was able to look around enough to tell that I wasn’t in my sleeping cave.
It was a place I’d never had cause to spend much time in before – the healers’ cave.
I was lying in one of the three narrow beds in here, the other two empty.
Along the wall behind my head were shelves with bandages and candles and jars of Vrika’s blood.
“She’s awake.” A Deep Sky face swam into focus above me. Salina. “Here.”
Something cool and slightly sticky was pressed to my lips. Valkiri gel. Easier that trying to drink water while lying down, I supposed. I parted my lips and accepted the hydrating gel. It helped ease the dryness and gross taste in my mouth.
“What…What happened?” I asked, unable to fathom why I was here. “And where…” I gritted my teeth for a second. Every word made my head throb. “Where’s Thaleo? I thought…I thought he was here.”
Why I thought that, I had no idea. I had no memory of being in this room at all.
“He was here,” said another voice. Valeria’s face winked into existence above me, beside Salina’s. “He was here with you all afternoon and all night as well. He slept briefly on the floor by your bed, but then he had to go do Gahn shit. It’s just before dawn now.”
All afternoon? All night? Dawn? None of this made any sense.
How long had I been here?
Suddenly anxious, I tried to rise, but Salina’s hands held me down.
“Try to keep your head and neck still,” she murmured.
“I’ll explain everything,” Valeria said quickly. “You just stay put.” She sat down on the bed beside mine, which meant I couldn’t see her without turning my head, which I decided not to do.
“We were with Linnet in the valley with the brolka,” she began.
I let my eyes close as Salina gently probed my scalp with her fingertips.
“The borog appeared. This one’s some adjacent species, or a new evolution or mutation.
It’s got wings, so it can travel a lot farther than anyone had expected.
It came out of nowhere and attacked. You, Tilly, and Zaria were in that little skinny spot that leads out.
It landed above you and started smashing on the rock overhead.
Tilly and Zaria both say that you pushed Zaria out of the way of a falling rock.
But you got knocked on the head pretty good in the process. ”
As she spoke, images brought themselves to life inside my soupy head. I didn’t remember anything about falling rocks, but I could, I was fairly certain now, remember the borog. Huge and grey. Wings. That’s right.
“Then what?” I croaked. How the hell had we escaped? “Anyone else hurt?”
“Everybody else is just fine. I got a good shot in on it. I think I took out one of its eyes with my gun. Nowhere near enough to kill that thing, of course. But it seemed to have done enough damage to scare it off.”
She sighed heavily. “But we don’t know when or where it’s going to pop back up.
If it’s underground or in the sky. As a result, no one is to leave the mountain except for warriors on braxilk-back for hunting and patrolling purposes.
We’ve also decided that we won’t use the shuttle to travel back to Gahn Errok’s next week.
Not until we have a better handle on this whole situation.
” I thought I heard a smile enter her voice.
“We tried to convince Linnet to come live inside. That went about as well as you’d imagine.
She refused to leave the brolka. She and the other Linnet are going to remain in place for now. ”
I softly snorted, imagining how that conversation must have gone, then immediately regretted it for the red throb that went through my head in response. “Ow.”
“What pains you?” Salina asked, pressing cool fingers to my forehead.
“Everything,” I groaned. When I heard her sharp intake of concerned breath I said, “Not everything. My head.”
“What about your neck?” Valeria asked. “Your back? Any tingling or numbness anywhere?”
With my eyes shut, I tried to take mental stock of how I felt. It was surprisingly difficult, like all of the gears in my head were gummed up, the connection between my brain and body slowed down to a crawl. But after a moment, I could reply that I wasn’t aware of any numbness anywhere.
“My neck feels stiff, I guess,” I added. “It’s hard to tell without moving it. But I don’t think it hurts the way my head does.”
“Hopefully that’s a good sign, then,” Valeria said, her brows furrowed. “We thought about taking you back to the Sea Sands for an X-ray.”
“Really?”
She laughed. “Yes, really. You heard us from the stretcher and made it pretty clear you didn’t want to do that. And then we realized that even if the X-ray showed us something, we wouldn’t be able to do much about it. Plus, there was the risk of the borog attacking the shuttle on the way.”
I didn’t remember any of that at all. She told it to me like it was a story about somebody else. Although, the stretcher sounded strangely familiar. Suddenly, I could picture it clear as day, a big yellow contraption of plastic and metal strapped to a wall in Valeria’s shuttle.
“Nasrin?”
“Right,” I said, losing track of the conversation and what reply was expected of me right now. “I’m so tired.”
“Go back to sleep,” Salina said softly, her hands drawing away from my face.
When I woke next, the light had changed.
Instead of cozy dimness lit by candles and fire, bright sun streamed in through what was a sort of naturally occurring window in this cave.
The healer’s cave was partway up the mountain, about the equivalent of being on the third storey of a building.
On its outer wall, the room buckled outwards with a large opening at eye level, creating a natural sort of balcony.
There was someone on that balcony. Thaleo?
No, this person was much too small.
“Tilly?”
“Ah! You’re awake!” she came into the cave and rounded the other beds until she reached mine. “It’s very good they have this little window area in the healers’ cave. You need the fresh air.” She sat on the edge of my bed. “How are you feeling?”
“Like shit, to be honest.” But I could already tell I didn’t feel quite as dire as the last time I’d been awake. It didn’t hurt as much to talk, and my head wasn’t pounding the same way.
“Valeria had some acetaminophen on the shuttle. It’s safe to take. No chance of increasing any potential bleeding.”
Potential bleeding. In my brain.
Lovely.
Tilly handed me a pill, then cupped an open valkiri plant to my mouth. Without moving my head too much, I was able to clumsily swallow both.
“Thanks,” I croaked.
She squeezed my hand and smiled.
The next few days passed in a painful blur.
I found it hard to keep track of time and slept a lot.
My waking hours were spent with Valeria and Tilly and Salina monitoring my progress.
With help, I got out of bed to use the bathroom, and everyone pretty much agreed, with much relief, that I didn’t appear to have any serious spinal cord injury.
But the head injury was enough to contend with on its own.
Too much exertion (which could be as simple as trying to hold a conversation for too long, or taking too many laps around the cave) left me dizzy and exhausted.
Even though I slept so much, none of it really felt restorative in the way I was used to.
It was either so deep and dreamless that I woke wondering if any time had even passed at all, or it was fractured and fevered, plagued by a borog prowling through my head.
Sometimes, I woke with a violent start to the sound of falling, crashing rocks.
Thaleo didn’t come.
After a week, my pride frayed beyond hope of salvation, I finally remarked on this to Tilly. Her brows rose at once.
“He comes every single night.”
“What? He does?”
I’d never seen him. Not once.
“You’re usually sleeping,” Tilly explained.
“I’m afraid he doesn’t have much time when he is here, though.
He’s constantly on patrol, keeping watch for the borog and assisting the hunters.
I don’t actually know when he sleeps, to be honest.” She laid the tunic she’d been working on down in her lap.
“He’d never say anything about it, of course.
But we can all tell that man is running himself ragged. ”
I hated hearing this. I hated imagining him pushing himself so hard. Hated how scared he probably was for his people.
And then, the few moments he did take inside the mountain for some rest, he apparently spent with me.
And I didn’t even fucking remember. I didn’t even know that he was there.
I resolved to try to stay awake at night so that I could finally get a chance to see him. It took a few more days before I was able to. But that night, about ten days after the borog’s attack, when he stole silently into the cave, I was ready. I sat up at once.
He froze, looking for all the world like a thief who’d just been caught.
“Hi,” I said, shyness suddenly stealing over me. Even though he’d apparently been with me every day, from my perspective, it felt like it had been more than two weeks since I’d last seen him.
He was just as imposing as ever, all those brutal lines and angles.
But Tilly had been right. I could see pure exhaustion in him. There was tension around his eyes, and a sort of spinning drunkenness to his sight stars. His hair looked windblown and tangled.
God. I wanted to hug him.
I lifted my arms and whispered, “Come here.”