Bloodfire (The Sojourns of Rebirth)

by Matthew Medina

  And so Catelyn sprang lightly from the roof as the sun slipped down below the horizon, the wood roof slats still warm beneath her soles, and returned to the inside of her roost. She took her father’s words, and his idea, and applied them literally.

  She gathered up all the food from the cache, which she had wrapped in individual parcels, placed each one carefully in a large box that she used for keeping dry goods, and then without a trace of mirth, proceeded to turn the entire contents of the box upside down.

  The parcels tumbled out, spilling all of the food onto the floor where they rolled, and bounced everywhere around her feet. With her bubble, she both heard the low muffled thumps of each package as they hit the floor, and felt the vibrations of each impact through the soles of her feet. It both sounded and felt to her like distant thunder rumbling on the horizon.

  She mentally mapped the location of every scrap of food as they fell, and they formed a clear mental image in her mind as they were scattered and strewn around her. As she bent down to begin picking up the first of the packages, a smile crept across her face.

  Later that night, she took the food out of her roost the same way she had carried it in. Six separate trips, with her pockets packed with individually wrapped bundles of various foods. Only instead of delivering the food to a single location, she spent that night skulking from building to building, placing bundles of wrapped food in window sills and garden beds and other obvious places, so that the owners of the homes where she delivered the food would find it the next morning.

  Each home she stopped at got a single parcel, with the exception being that she left two packages at homes where she knew that there was a chosen family with a child.

  Afterward, she returned to her roost exhausted, but satisfied. Once again, she whispered a prayer to the Divines, who had shown her what she should have seen for herself. It was not lost on her that since losing her sight six sojourns ago the Divines were still guiding her steps and helping her to find her way.

  A small voice of doubt, one which she was familiar with, tried to claw its way up from inside but she pushed it back down, burying it deep. Feeling good about herself, she crawled over to her blankets, curled up without undressing, and fell fast asleep.

  Despite the pride she felt at her own generosity, when dreams finally came, they brought forth more painful memories of her past.

  Catelyn stood motionless amidst the remains of her old life.

  It was almost another prayer before that young girl moved a muscle. The words of the Imperial soldier rang in her ears like a curse as she stood numbly in the cold, hollow shell that had once been her home.

  “You’re useless now.”

  He was right, she knew. She had only seen ten sojourns. She was blind. She was alone, and had never been apart from both of her parents before. She had no idea how to survive on her own. She was going to die.

  Why is this happening? she wondered.

  No answers came to her. She felt nothing but emptiness and crippling fear, and in combination, they paralyzed her.

  She tried to picture her parent’s faces as they had been when they had been alive, just a few prayers ago. But the only visions of them that came to her now were of their last moments; of their blood-soaked faces and bodies slumped on the floor, pleading for mercy. And then the sobs came uncontrollably, as she thought about how she would never again feel her father’s gentle hands enclosing her in his strong embrace, or hear the soft crooning of her mother’s voice as she sang with Catelyn before bed each night.

  She cried until her ribs ached from the exertion.

  When the sobbing finally subsided, she reflexively wiped at her eyes with the backs of her hands, expecting to feel the warm moist tracks that her tears would have left down her face. But instead of tears, she felt the ragged holes in her flesh where her eyes had been burned away.

  Her heart turned as cold as ice as she let her fingers explore the damage that had been done to her. Grooves of raw flesh ran in rivulets across the upper half of her face, like the tracks of permanent tears carved into the shape of a mask. The pain was gone completely now, surprisingly. The flesh beneath her fingers was rough to the touch where the bloodfire had burned her, a stark contrast to the smoothness of the surrounding skin. Feeling with her fingers, she could tell that her eyes and the sockets were melted together into a bulbous mass of scar tissue. Even here, where the damage was the worst, she felt no pain.

  She had never heard of bloodfire before this day, but it was clearly something unique to have done so much damage and caused so much pain, only to leave behind nothing but scars. Scars which were now an unforgettable part of her life. Whatever it was, bloodfire had marked her, branded her, made her a child of its own.

  In the same way, the words of the Imperial officer had marked her in another way.

  “You’re useless now.”

  Catelyn repeated those words in her head and tried to find the lie in them, but she couldn’t. Not without lying to herself.

  “I am useless now, aren’t I?” she whispered softly to herself. “What am I supposed to do?”

  But then, almost as soon as she had formulated that thought and the words passed her lips, her father’s words sprang up from somewhere deep inside of her, almost as though he were right there to correct her, teaching her another of his many lessons.

  “Sometimes, when you’re stuck on a problem, it helps to turn things upside down, or turn them around, so they’re backwards,” he would say, and Catelyn remembered trying really hard to understand what good that would do, but it never had. Although it hadn’t helped her when she had asked questions about her lessons from the books they had given her on mathematics or history, she set aside her doubts and fears and clung to these words now like a lifeline. They were sacred to her now; his words were the last connection she had to her father.

  “Sometimes, when you’re stuck on a problem, it helps to turn things upside down, or turn them around, so they’re backwards.”

  She thought again about the words of the Imperial soldier, and then her father’s words, and she pondered how this would help.

  “You’re useless now,” she whispered, the words beginning to lose their power, in favor of the ideas that her father had left for her.

  “...turn them around...”

  Now, you’re useless, she thought to herself.

  Now. You’re useless.

  Now.

  And Catelyn knew the answer to the questions that now defined her.

  Maybe I am useless now, but I don’t have to be useless forever. I’m alive. I’m still here. Thank you, father.

  Her heart swelled with gratitude as she realized that it must be the Divines who had come to her in that moment. She had been helpless, and so they sent her father’s spirit to her, to remind her of his words. She said a silent prayer to the Divines, thanking Them for watching out for her in this moment.

  Faith in the Divines was one of the things her parents had told her about again and again as she was growing up, and she believed it with everything that she was. She had to.

  She could have been killed by the intruders, or by the Imperial soldiers. But she hadn’t died. There had to have been a reason. The Divines had intervened. And then, they had come to her to remind her of her father’s words. There could be no other explanation. She knew it.

  She didn’t know how much more they would help her, only that they would. All Catelyn knew with certainty was that she was still alive, and that the Divines had made it possible. She very much intended to honor the gift of her life from the Divines by doing everything she could to stay that way. She may not know very much about how to do that yet, but she knew that she had to try. She felt that in the very fiber of her being.

  A smaller voice within tried to find purchase, and that voice whispered difficult questions. It wondered where the Divines had been when her parents were being attacked and murdered, but she pushed the voice aside. She had no room left inside her for such doubts right n
ow.

  Something that she had thought just a few moments ago came back to her, and she revisited the idea. She was not a child of the bloodfire. She was a child of the Divines. It was time to act like it.

  Blind, alone, and wearing nothing but rags, Catelyn knew it would be harder than anything she had had to do before, but she trusted that her life was now in the Divine’s hands.

  She stopped focusing on the darkness that was now her world both figuratively and literally, and reached out her hands, using them to probe in front of her. She gently took a step forward, her legs stiff from standing motionless for so long.

  Although she had a vague recall of the layout of her home, during the melee and in the confusion of the pain from the bloodfire, she realized she no longer had any idea where in the house she was. She would need to find her way slowly, fumbling with her hands and feet, listening with her ears. Tentatively, she moved to where she thought the kitchen wall should be. The trip seemed to take prayers.

  Finally, when she touched cool brick under her fingers, she sighed in victory and pressed herself into the wall, feeling the firm comfort of the solid surface beneath her fingers. Slowly, but with determination, she reached out with her hands to feel her way along the wall, shuffling to the side, both hands outstretched and sweeping in broad arcs up and down the wall.

  Once more, it felt as though it took forever before she finally reached a corner of the wall. She pictured her home in her mind, and guessed that she was near the small table where her family ate their meals. She reached out, but the table was not there. She groaned inwardly at the failure, realizing for the first time just how much she had taken her sight for granted.

  Where is it? she wondered.

  No longer confident about where she was in the house, Catelyn had to decide what to do. She stopped moving and tried to explore her surroundings using her other senses. She could hear sounds in the distance, but they were muffled and indistinct and completely unhelpful. She smelled burning from somewhere to her right, but it too was vague and gave her no clues as to her location. The wall felt like any wall, featureless and undefined. The ground under her feet was wood, like the kind she was used to feeling inside her home, but the rough beams felt colder than she remembered.

  Am I even still inside? she thought bitterly. Where am I?

  Feeling frustrated, she tried to conjure up more helpful advice from her parents, but this time, it only led her to begin sobbing again, kneeling down and thinking about how she would never see or hear or feel her mother or father again.

  The sobbing this time only lasted a few breaths, and still no tears came.

  When she regained her composure, she reckoned that the rest of her life would be up to her. Her and the Divines. She muttered the most sincere prayer she could, trying to remember the sacred words that her parents had taught her all those sojourns ago. Truthfully, although her parents reminded her daily of their own faith and belief in the Divines, they had stopped praying several sojourns before, and Catelyn was only half sure that she knew what to say to beseech them, but she tried anyway, calling on Them to hear her pleas and guide her with Their sheltering hands.

  Most holy Divines, You’ve given me my life. I don’t understand why but You saved me. And in doing so, You’ve made me Your instrument. I wish to do Your will, but I don’t know how. How can I follow You when I can’t even find my way? Please send me a sign, something to guide me. Please, Divines. I am Yours. Guide me.

  Catelyn waited patiently for a response, but no call from on high came. She received no instructions, recalled no bits of wisdom from either of her parents.

  Nothing happened.

  Again, that small voice crept into her thoughts from somewhere deep inside her, questioning why the Divines were even worth considering after what They had just let happen to her and her parents. And just as before, Catelyn stifled these thoughts and pushed them away.

  She reminded herself of some of the other teachings of her parents; that the Divines’ plan was a mystery to all, and that they more often than not helped those who helped themselves. The small voice inside her continued to badger her with doubts, but now was not the time to think about such things, and she realized that whatever happened from here on, the first thing that she would need to do is to just keep moving.

  Catelyn knew that she was standing on the threshold of the rest of her life. She continued to put one foot in front of the other, until she finally made it out of her home and slowly began shuffling her way down the hallway of her building.

  She advanced along the wall, feeling carefully with fingers and toes, and listening for the sound of any approaching thing or even worse, person.

  Life in the Seat was hard enough without the

  disadvantages she now had, chief among them being only ten sojourns, and the complete loss of her sight. Even the most hardened criminals tended to stick together in packs for mutual support and protection; a fact that she had learned firsthand from her father when he sometimes described the altercations he got in as part of his job. Catelyn wasn’t supposed to know about the danger he faced each day, but he always told Sera before they fell asleep each night. Their hovel was small and Catelyn was always a light sleeper.

  Being caught out alone in the Seat was generally thought to be a sentence of death, or at the very least an easy path to becoming a victim.

  Catelyn might have more book smarts than street smarts, but she was smart enough to know that she should fear what the thugs that roamed the city would do to her if they found her. It made her wary with every step she took toward the outside world. She stretched out with all of her awareness and senses, in the hope that she would feel or hear any who would approach her.

  As she advanced, shuffling her feet forward along the wall, the cool bricks of the wall seemingly the entirety of her world, a strange sensation startled her. Her outstretched right hand, which had been scrabbling against cold rough brick for what seemed like prayers, suddenly had grown warm.

  She pulled her hand back instinctively, fearing that she had touched something hot and burned herself. As she pulled her hand to her chest, she realized it wasn’t hot enough to damage her hand, but she had felt the heat so intensely that it had startled her.

  She stretched her hand once more out into the air, and again felt the warmth on her skin, rich and deep and triggering a familiar feeling she’d experienced before. A smile crept across her lips as she recognized the sensation.

  Sunlight!

  She experienced a feeling of giddiness as she considered all the ramifications of the sensation and what this told her about her situation. She now knew, for example, that she had reached the end of the hallway, where a large portion of the ceiling had crumbled away, opening the hallway to the open air. Her parents had tried for sojourns to keep the hole patched, but after every violent rainstorm, the patch would come apart and they would need to start all over again. Eventually, they had just given up.

  This meant that she was mere paces away from stepping outside, and seeing what the Divines had planned for her. As much as she wished that she could, she knew she couldn’t stay here any longer. If the Imperial soldiers didn’t come back for her, eventually scavengers would when they heard about what had happened to Tomas and Sera. It wasn’t safe for her here anymore. And truthfully, Catelyn would never be able to sleep here again, knowing that her parents had been disemboweled right there on the floor of their living area.

  She didn’t know yet where she was going to go, or how she would survive, but she had faith that it would work out according to the Divine’s will. She felt a flicker of something taking root inside her heart. It was too early for her to call it hope yet, but it was a spark, and right now, a spark was good enough to keep her putting one foot in front of the other.

  Best of all was the feeling of the sunlight on her skin. She had always loved the warmth of that sensation in the summer time, and she would still love it, with or without her eyes to see it, but just now she took it as
a sign.

  She stepped out slowly into the patch of sunlight. Finally, she could visualize this part of her past in her mind’s eye. She saw the mold and mildew covered plaster, and the gaping hole where the rain came in, and pictured herself moving into the purest orange tinted rays of light. With each step, more and more she felt it embrace her whole body, from the sensation of the tiles beneath her bare soles all the way to the radiating warmth she felt at the crown of her shaved head.

  Standing now, feeling the sun beat down upon her bare head, reaching up with her hand, stubble scraping against her tender palm, she thanked the Divines for sending her this sign, and for allowing her to recognize it and find the energy and the will to go on. To take another step, and then another.

  Catelyn woke, feeling refreshed, despite the difficult dreams of her most challenging days. If there was one thing that Catelyn had learned in all the sojourns since that day, however, it was not to dwell on the past.

  Now that she had solved the problem of what to do with all the extra food she'd discovered, she quickly moved onto figuring out her next move. And for Catelyn, that meant finding her next mark.

  Whatever else she considered herself, there was only one thing that had enabled her to get through each day in the six sojourns since her parents had been murdered. Only one thing that had defined her well enough to have helped her to survive alone in a place like the Seat.

  Catelyn, by her thirteenth sojourn, and after some of the most grueling trials in her life, had become an accomplished thief.

  It was not a profession that she was particularly proud of.

  She knew that taking from others was wrong, and not just because it was against the law and getting caught would likely mean her immediate death. She knew it was against the teachings of the Divines as well.

  But she also believed that the Divines had saved her life for a reason, and she believed they would not wish her to throw that gift away by allowing herself to starve to death.

  Her readings from the book about ethics and philosophy, the one she had favored more than any of the other old volumes in her collection, offered her another perspective which she agreed with. She believed that it was just as immoral to keep food from a starving person, as it was to steal it, but that is exactly what the Empire did each and every day. There was no help for those less fortunate in the Empire, and so by helping herself to the food and belongings of those more fortunate than herself, Catelyn did what she had to in order to stay alive.