The pain punched me in the gut in way of greeting. My head thrummed, and each breath sent stars of pain shooting through my abdomen.
“She’s waking up,” a deep voice said. “Go faster, but don’t rush it.”
“You’re contradicting yourself,” a tense female voice snapped irritably. Sparks of pain crawled methodically across my stomach with almost hypnotizing rhythm. “Just hold her still.”
“Whaa –” I tried, panic beginning to set in as heavy hands settled on my shoulders, pressing them into the hard wood slats of the bed beneath me. The jolt of fear helped get my eyes open, and I saw Borri looming over me, his shirt spattered with blood and concern in his face. A glint of short-cropped blonde hair beyond him hinted at Paathke, but she was bent over me too, hands working at my stomach.
“What are you doing?” I managed. I was suddenly aware that my shirt had been cut away from my wound and cool air rushed over my bare skin.
“Lie still,” Borri said gently. “Don’t talk, breathe small shallow breaths. This will be over soon. Make those stitches a little bigger, Paathke. Did you want to try the other needle?”
“I’m good.” Paathke’s voice was tight with tension. “You really should have done this; I was never born to be a seamstress.”
“It doesn’t have to be neat,” Borri said calmingly. “Don’t worry about straight stitches; worry about firm stitches. You’re doing great.” His tone was soothing, and I found myself relaxing just a little. I breathed carefully, trying not to move.
“There.” She sounded immensely satisfied and relieved, and I felt a sharp tug that made me gasp. “The knots are the easiest part, and my favorite. It means I’m done.” She stepped back and dashed back her hair with her arm, blowing out her lips.
“Still gets in the way,” I murmured. “Even short.”
“What was that?” Borri asked, leaning closer.
Paathke scowled, but her lips twitched. “She said she’s feeling better, thank you.”
“Actually, I am,” I said. I peered down at my stomach. A lot of the blood had been cleaned up, but it had bled more while Paathke was working. “It doesn’t hurt nearly as much as I expected.”
“Sajia,” Borri said gently, “that’s because we used a numbing rub on the wound before stitching it to help dull the pain, and forced a strong pain draft into you. It’ll hurt a lot more later.”
“Oh,” I said uncertainly. I really wasn’t good with pain.
Paathke poured water from a jug onto a rag and swabbed her hands and arms, and then, carefully, my wound. Borri collected the needle and spool of thread packed it up into the medicinal bag. I hadn’t realized just how small my room was until there were three of us in it; we were practically on top of one another.
Paathke handed me a canteen that smelled of apple juice. “Sip this,” she ordered. She helped me sit up and prop myself against the wall, but just that effort made my head whirl and nearly pass out. I wondered just how much blood I’d lost.
“Why...” I swallowed a drink of the juice, trying to find the words. “Why didn’t you just kill me? When you found me, I mean. I’d be Reborn, you’d be saved a lot of work...” I would be spared living with a gash in my gut while trying to train and survive Leander. Suddenly the idea of having a reset ability to my life and health and body didn’t seem like such a bad thing, outside of Leander’s treatment.
“It’s easy to think that way, when you first start dying,” Paathke said to the air. She leaned against the wall, not looking at me.
Borri sat cross-legged on the bed beside me. “It quickly loses its luster,” he said. “For me, it never had much of a draw. Think: every time I die, I lose four years of everybody’s life but mine. I die five times, everyone I know will be twenty years older than I last knew them. Before I knew it, you and Paathke could be old grannies while I was still in the flower of my youth.”
Paathke snorted. “Grandpa, you’re not in your flower of youth now. You’re almost old enough to be my Da.”
“Well, in that case,” he said, smiling at her, “I would have had to get started very young indeed. But my point remains. Time lost in death adds up. And for a lot of Eternals, it gets to the point where...” He shrugged. “They just get sick of dying and coming back and dying and coming back. Eternally.”
“Also,” Paathke added, “it’s against the rules. Non-sanctioned deaths are strictly forbidden – you can only die on a mission or at Leander’s hands, or if it’s entirely an accident.”
“But what could they do to us?” I protested. “Lock us up, their precious soldiers? Kill us? What good would any of that do?”
“Ask Gwen,” Paathke said darkly.
Borri rubbed his thumb along his scruffy jaw. “They can do many things, Sajia, horrors you don’t want to know. Tortures that will make the deathless scream for death. Poor Gwen.” He sighed. “She had too much fire in her. With enough time, in any other place, how bright a star she would have shone! But she burned them, and they took her away, two years ago, head high and back straight, to face whatever terrible deathless fate they could concoct. No one has seen her since.” He wiped his face and cleared his throat.
“Do you suppose that’s why elves are supposed to hate the humans so much?” I asked. “Because they’re capable of such pointless cruelty and viciousness?” I didn’t think of myself as a hating kind of person, but there were some humans... the king, Leander...
“Perhaps, in a roundabout way,” Borri said, and a light glinted in his eyes. He straightened, and his eyes grew distant as an almost chanting-like quality came over his voice. “But it began in an ancient day. Before there was time or space or a world at all, before the Fae, there was only Alphar, the Allmaker as the Low Tribes call Him. Alphar created the universe, birthed from His imagination. From His very mind galaxies were born, the stars we see in the night. And one of those many stars He chose to shape specially.”
I opened my mouth, about to say that I knew all this, that every Azurian child knew that before they could scarcely walk, but I couldn’t bring myself to. The way Borri lit up when he told stories warmed my heart, and it took my mind from the pain. Also, hearing the story of the world’s creation was nothing like any other experience I’d had.
“He took the Earth in his hands,” Borri continued, “and pulled back the seas, drawing up land like clay beneath His fingers, forming mountains and valleys and plains as He saw was fit. He draped the sky around the world to protect it from the fire of the nearby stars. From the land, He fashioned plant life, trees and crops and grasses, growing things to brighten and sustain the world. Then He took from the plants he had made and created animals and creatures of every kind, and from the waters of the seas he fashioned fish of all sizes and kinds.
“But Alphar was not satisfied yet; one thing yet remained to be made. So taking the mud of the Earth, He mixed His own blood with it, and it was golden and holy. That is why, to this day, many of the once-Fae tribes consider gold sacred and do not trade in it or use it for any purpose but honoring Alphar. He formed from it the Fae, people fair to look upon, rich in power that was a shadow of Alphar Himself, and they were different from each other yet the same within, made from His blood and the dust of the Earth, where divine met material. And He breathed upon them, and He said: “Wake up!” and life entered them.
“And He was satisfied.”
“And then the humans screwed up and brought down the Fae,” Paathke put in. “You know, the Norlunders don’t believe all that anymore, if they ever did. They have these seven gods or something – I’m a little rusty. I know Queen Nor was the catch-all chief goddess of Arrakan and that’s about it.”
“Do you believe in Alphar?” I asked her.
She nodded, shrugging. “Humans are a corrupt influence, it seems.”
“But I still don’t understand why the humans and elves are supposed to hate each other so much. I mean, wouldn’t all the once-Fae hate the humans equally?”
“I would have gotten to that,” Borri said, frowning in Paathke’s direction, “if I’d been allowed.”
Paathke looked slightly chastened. “Right, so the five Fae tribes, Builders, Wanderers, Tenders, Warriors, and Rebels, each named after their special talents bestowed on them by Alphar and all that. In other words, there were the people obsessed with art and making things that go clunk, the people with a severe case of wanderlust, the tree-huggers who wanted to marry nature, the protector-defender-hunter, keep-everyone-safe-and-alive people, and... I don’t know. What were the Rebels good at, anyway?” She looked at Borri, who was staring patiently at her as if his eyes could bore a hole in her head.
“Is this my story or yours?” he asked.
“Fine, take it away. I’ll just go get you a new shirt and some clothes for Sajia.” Paathke took up the medicinal bag and clattered out, her going a bit stormy.
“Is she okay?” I asked, worried. Paathke mad might get violent. Had I done something to hurt her feelings?
“I expect she’s angry at Leander and the king for what happened to you, and angrier that she can’t do anything about it.” He rested a hand on my knee. “It rankles her soul. She’ll be fine.”
I winced as a new wave of pain washed over me, and Borri dug in his pocket and handed me a fat capsule. “Don’t tell Paathke, because she’d worry about it killing you, but you can probably take another dose of these. After a few days you should be able to get by without them, but for now...” he tousled at my hair, “take your medicine, and drink that juice.” I gulped down the pill, trying not to rub at my stitches. They felt like puckery mountains, an entire range marching across my stomach.
Slowly the pain started to ebb, and I asked my question again, a little blurrily as numbness filled my body. “No one talks about why the elves and humans have such enmity. Back home, my aunt and uncle never talked about my elf side and wouldn’t let me learn anything about them. Servants told me some. I shouldn’t get sarcasm because I’m an elf, blah blah blah. They never told me much about my own story or parents, or how I came to be, or what I am.” She is too wild in her blood.
I shook off the memory of my aunt’s words, jerking to myself. I’d been rambling. Borri was watching my face intently, listening. I felt suddenly embarrassed that I’d said so much. “What I’m trying to say,” I hastened on, “is why the infamous enmity?”
Borri nodded. “I was almost to that. The Rebels, by the way, were good at discovering new territory, like the Wanderers only in theoretical senses. Like the Builders were good at creating art and mechanics, it was the Rebels who explored and discovered the concepts behind. In my home, back in Zahwi, we have accomplished many things you cannot even dream of, but only because we alone...” He hesitated, then smiled ruefully. “It is a more carefully guarded secret, so do not tell this to anyone. But we alone of the once-Fae tribes did not entirely strike all traces and remnants of the Rebels from our tribe. We retain books and records of things they learned and conceptualized long ago, and are only just catching up to them. Even the humans have forgotten what they once knew; when Alphar revoked all their gifts and stripped them of their power, they forgot how to understand the things they’d envisioned and discovered, and it was eventually lost to all except the Zahwi. We still remember, and it has taken us far ahead of other tribes. But I digress.
“The Rebels probed too far in their explorations, you see. They sought to plumb the spiritual worlds and understand them, even as they had gained an understanding for the universe. They thought to themselves, ‘if the stars of the sky can be measured and reached, with the right mechanics, perhaps the spiritual world as well. Perhaps loved ones who are dead can be visited, or who even knows what else!’ And so they embarked on a fateful journey, and did not heed their brethren, the other tribes, who warned them ‘this is not how Alphar intended for you to use your gifts. You will bring His wrath upon us all with your foolishness!’
“The Rebels probed deep, and they found much, though what exactly is not remembered – and with good reason. But it is known that they found an evil, a demon called Varak, whose nature was to corrupt and destroy, even as Alphar’s is to create and renew. He was everything Alphar is not, and he beguiled them, attempting to lure them into his power and gain their aid. Then Alphar said ‘no more!’, and He took from the Fae their gifts and power. The Rebels were stripped of everything and cast out, warned that their fate would be worse if they transgressed again, and they became the humans, the Azurians. The Warriors became the Norlunders, the Wanderers became the Shimada, and the Builders became the Zahwi. The Tenders – ‘tree-huggers’, as Paathke called them – begged to maintain their power over the trees they loved so that they might ensure they flourished and were never destroyed. Alphar let them bind their essence to the trees, and they became the Dryadin, more purely Fae than the other fallen tribes. However, as time and generations passed and they grew increasingly proud and bitter and isolated, they separated themselves from the trees. The other tribes took to calling them tiet, which is the Fae word meaning shadow. But it also means elf, and has been mistranslated so often that the original meaning ‘a shadow of what they once were’ has faded and been forgotten.”
“Great, so I’m half ‘shadow-of-something-that-once-was-special’,” I said. It seemed like an insult. But, if elves were anything like their reputation, they probably had it coming.
“In a way. But that is why the elves hate the humans so much, because they blame them for everything that happened, and the humans hate the elves because they are – as they’ll never let anyone forget – more purely Fae. Hatred breeds enmity breeds hatred. Generations of habit have led to today, where one can barely stand to be in the same room with the other.”
“And yet...” I mused, “I happened. What do you suppose...?” I so dearly wished I could know how that had happened. Who had my mother been? How had she met my father? How did they fall in love, an elf and a human? My brain leapt wildly from thought to thought, trying to envision a scenario that seemed likely.
/ / /
I didn’t realize I’d fallen asleep until Paathke’s voice hissed in my ear. “How can you sleep like that? I get cricks in my neck!”
I jerked awake and found I’d zonked out sitting up, my head lolled against my shoulder and every muscle cramped and aching. “Me too,” I groaned, pain roaring everywhere as I wiggled my toes and tried to move, my wound loudest of all.
“I brought you some of my clothes,” Paathke said, helping me to my feet. “There was a mix-up with the servants and they still haven’t made your other sets yet, but they’re working on them now. In the meantime, we’ll make these work, though they’ll be enormous on you, sorry. I’ve had them get a warm bath ready for you in a washroom; here, don’t rush it. Let me help you.”
Like I was a type to rush things. I was such a wimp about pain, honestly. I clung to her arm as she gently guided me out the door and we gimped through the halls to the washroom.
“Borri said to tell you to meet him in the practice room after dinner,” Paathke said, hovering in the doorway. “He’ll coach you on fighting wounded so you’ll be ready for when Leander sends for you next.”
I stared at her, then shut my eyes. “You got to be kidding.” My life was hell.
