18. Belonging #2
My skirt tangled my legs, and my foot slipped on the fabric and I fell.
I hissed, shaking an injured elbow. I was fine.
This was no worse than falling at home. I’d fallen lots of times.
I hiked up my skirt and figured out how to tie it girded up.
Modest calves weren’t going to save me here, but my footing might.
I started again. I think I wasted too much time with the initial untying of my hands, and then with the skirt.
I picked the same wall again, because I knew I could get partway up, but I reached a point where I couldn’t get my feet to reach, and my arms weren’t anywhere near strong enough to pull me.
Could I cut a foothold with the knife? No, this was rock, and I had hours, not years.
I retraced back down. The sun passed its zenith. I chose another wall.
I was thirsty.
They said they’d done this while it was raining. How? I was gasping for air and trying not to slip as it was. I lost a foothold and I hung, for a moment, by my arms. When my feet found a purchase and I could push to the ledge, my hand was bleeding.
Another wrong choice. Another dead end.
The sun sank. The world chilled. That pinprick of sky stained red.
Sounds started to stir in those caves. I climbed.
The next point without a foothold was thirty feet below the rim.
I tried retracing partway, but I couldn’t risk getting close enough to meet the jaws of whatever lurked below.
I tried looking down, but my eyes found only murk.
If I had orc vision, would I be able to find my way?
How long had it been since I left Rowena’s?
Would Grezha look for me? Would someone think to look here?
No, I had to focus. I couldn’t count on some lucky rescue and wait until I was eaten by whatever lurked in that darkness.
I reached out, feeling for something to grab.
I’d thought I was strong, in my village. I’d convinced myself by fetching and hauling and carrying, with survival and silence, but here I couldn’t pull myself up a rock. I couldn’t see two feet in front of my face. I couldn’t fight a monster in the dark.
I was weak.
What a wild way for the world to punish being weak.
Grime dug into the cut on my hand, as I grasped and clung.
I could hate myself all day, but could I deserve this?
I wanted to scream. How did it help anyone if I could scale up this wall?
Why did singing my mother’s busted lip closed make me a danger, and showing they could climb and kill make them wanted?
I found a handhold. Pebbles slipped under my feet, clattered to the basin below me. In those caves, something rattled and stirred.
The wind was cold. My tongue was sand in my mouth. My arms trembled.
I’d used to think magic could change my father, that the right words or song or smile, the right water with oak leaves and acorns would turn him kind and wise.
I’d used to think we could pray harder, clean faster, smile quicker, cry enough, that life was a magic spell and if you did it right the monster became a man.
And when he shook me till my teeth clacked together I wasn’t angry at him; I was angry at us, because we didn’t get it right; we didn’t save him.
But I grew. I grew out of childish things and magic that saved people.
I grew out of thinking the world cared about our cries.
I couldn’t make my father a man any more than I could make him a sow pig.
I couldn’t change him, not by being good at climbing, or fetching, or carrying, or smiles.
My strength couldn’t have stopped him and my weakness couldn’t have broken him.
So why was the world’s answer always to demand muscles I didn’t have?
Why was there room for a monster and not for me?
I saw the handholds in front of me, the too-wide ledges and fraying roots, and I grabbed again, but I didn’t have the strength to climb, to push any higher.
I wasn’t going to make it higher, and it was so stupid that I had to.
I shouldn’t have to climb, and I hated my father— he was stupid and petty and small and human and a monster, and I hated him— but this climb was wrong and my life was wrong and my mother should never have had to kill him.
It wasn’t fair to ask her. It wasn’t fair of the village and it wasn’t fair of me, and wasn’t there anyplace in this world for a person who was weak?
Why did life give Jack Cooper people to do as he liked with and then demand brutality of us if we wanted to live, of Vrathgar with his scars and his mother he loved and his family he didn’t want to see?
Why demand that we were only as safe as we proved in blood for, and then punish whatever gentle piece of us was left?
I reached, and I fell.
I fell.
Stars wheeled in front of my eyes. Growls and rustlings stirred in the dark, clicks against stone. The breath was slammed out of me.
I was going to die.
Maybe it was okay. Everyone died sometime. Maybe my mother wouldn’t be sad. I could see her again. I could tell her I’d gotten to sing a little, at the end.
I could tell her about him, that there was someone who held me for a time. That there was someone who made the world seem less monstrous by being near.
I rolled onto my hands and knees, back towards the wall that I couldn’t see. I gripped the rock. My hands were nicked and bleeding. Dirt ground into the cuts, and blood slipped on the stone.
I climbed. The darkness stirred below me, as I hauled myself a little higher. Claws clicked against the stone.
They were already awake. They’d smell the blood I was leaving trails of, everywhere. So there was nothing I would lose by singing.
My throat hurt, and I sang.
I didn’t sing to beg. I sang for the sound of my own voice whipped in the wind back at me.
I sang grief for the pieces of life I was leaving, for my own, foolish hopes that I had to let go, and the prettiness of the stars flung into patches in that hazy palm’s-breadth of sky.
I sang goodbye to the husband who wasn’t going to miss me.
He’d be upset that I was another person he couldn’t save.
But maybe there would be relief in it, too, in not having to worry about doing right by someone who had wronged him.
I knew I’d wronged him.
The cuts on my hands didn’t heal— I couldn’t heal myself— but singing took away some of the pain. Below me, something growled in the dark.
The cold was seeping into me, and I stopped trying to climb, because my hands and feet were numb and I couldn’t feel the stone, certainly couldn’t see it, and one wrong move would send me down into unknown jaws.
I focused on holding on, still, on not letting my knees lock, and I sang until I didn’t have my voice anymore.
I was going to miss him. I’d avoided him so much, and I was going to miss him.
The dawn had just broken as I lost my grip the last time, and I slid downwards.
The sky was gray, wheeling above me, the stars faded.
It felt like a splatter, like a crack. Everything hurt, my arms, my back, and there was movement in the dark, big shapes.
I couldn’t even hum, couldn’t find my voice for a last goodbye.
A shape loomed over my face, and sniffed, a creature large enough to blot out the sky.
Then it yiped, and the creatures scattered, sounds retreating. Someone was yelling, a high, terrified voice. Another woman. Someone was grabbing at my arms, shouting words in their alien tongue. A face came into view, Larrakh.
So Khal’s cousin had stayed. Steel rang as she screamed, and struck.
I didn’t have the strength to care a lot, whether I lived, but I watched.
Larrakh was good at this. She was everything I wasn’t.
If someone ever managed to hurt her, no one would say it was her fault.
She was the warrior they were looking for.
I think I went in and out of consciousness, because it should have been an hour, but it felt like breaths, pain and light.
It was quiet, no more beasts. The sun streaked golden overhead, too light. She dropped next to me again, big terrified eyes, said something in gibberish again. She cursed.
“I…you…wait. The sister goes. You. Safe. Understand?” She touched my face. That was odd, her hand on my cheek. “I find help.” She gnawed her lip, muttered, “Sorry. Sorry,” and tore away.
It didn’t feel like long, lying alone at the bottom of a pit in the sun. It didn’t feel like very long.
Vrathgar’s voice echoed, angry, like I could have imagined him. He was scooping me into his chest, and I tried to shift my weight, heard myself screaming. Was I shattered? Could this only be bruising, when it felt like pieces of glass cutting from inside?
“Don’t try,” he said, hoarse. “Don’t try. I’ve got you.” And how was he climbing the wall and carrying me? How did that make sense, when I’d tried all night, by myself, and I hadn’t made it halfway?
“How…are you climbing?” I think I whimpered it.
Some ragged sound came out of him. “I practiced a lot. I know the way. Don’t try to hold on. I’ve got you.”
“You practiced.” I think the words slurred, squeaked. My vision was white and dark again. “How?”
We were almost at the top.
“I was terrified I’d fail, so I used to come down here, over and over.” He grunted as he took our weight on that leg.
“There are monsters.”
“I know. You’re safe now, alright?”
I tried to ignore another wave of agony, cling to his neck, with what little strength was left to me. “You could have died,” I whispered.
A sound like exhaustion. “I wasn’t afraid of dying, ’Nora. I was afraid to fail.” We reached the lip, and he pulled me with him.