Bloodfire (The Sojourns of Rebirth)

by Matthew Medina

  She opened the shutters on the lamp and her eyes returned to normal, or normal for how she was now, shining like gems. She approached the mirror again, and as she did, she watched how she walked, placing her weight on the balls of her feet and the swaying of her hips and the bounce of her breasts under her clothing. Seeing how her body had developed, a thought came to Catelyn which caused her to blush and look around her, even though she knew that she was alone in the apartment.

  She stood a pace away from the mirror, looking at her body, so different from the child’s body she remembered. The thought which had occurred to her earlier blossomed into a deep curiosity, and she reached her arms up and pulled her shirt up and over her head. Her pale skin was as she remembered, but everything else was different. Her sojourns of training had given her definition in her arms and shoulders, and they were broader than she remembered, yet still feminine. She looked at her breasts, and cupped them in her hands, feeling their weight and the softness of the tissue. As she felt the, she let herself imagine Duncan’s hands on them, and her breath caught in her throat. She felt a flushing in her body that she had never experienced before.

  She wanted to stop herself, but her nipples responded to the thoughts now coursing through her mind, and stiffened. She ran her fingers over her breasts, and when she touched her nipples, pleasure radiated through her body in a number of places. Her eyes half closed now, she imagined Duncan’s lips on her breasts, and she felt a tingling in her lower body, between her legs.

  Catelyn felt her cheeks flush in embarrassment at the realization of what she was doing, but she didn’t stop.

  Her parents, especially her mother, had talked to her about what she was experiencing in her body right now and how she had changed from a young girl into a young woman. She had experienced this fleeting curiosity about her body before, but after she had lost her sight, her only priority had been survival. Not once in the sojourns since her life had been so radically altered by the bloodfire had she had the desire or the opportunity to explore her body this way. She had constructed fantasies in her mind which made her feel good, but those thoughts had never led to her touching herself this way.

  She opened her eyes and saw a young woman staring back at her, one hand moving across her chest, which was flushed now, her breasts swelling with desire. Her other hand she moved down, and undid the drawstring of her pants. They fell to her ankles, and she stepped out of them, to stand naked before the mirror. She took note of her hips, and how much wider they were. When she had last seen her body, it was slender and straight, and now she had the budding curves of a woman, even if she was still skinny. These last few days in Ortis’ refuge, eating what she could from his stores, had enabled her to gain some of that weight back which she’d lost while being imprisoned by the Emperor.

  She focused now on the small tuft of dark red hair between her legs, and as she did, she again felt and saw her cheeks flush at the thoughts that were taking over her mind. She welcomed them, but at the same time she felt a sense of shame, which she couldn’t fully explain. She knew that having thoughts about sex was normal, and her mother had talked to her about the many different types of things people did with one another for pleasure. But this was the first time in Catelyn’s life, that such ideas reached out beyond just being concepts in her head, and were they taking hold of her in a real way.

  She had felt the flesh of her sex many times before when she bathed of course, but it had never given her pleasure and she had never experienced anything like she was feeling now.

  She approached the mirror closer, until she was standing just in front of it, and tilted the top edge of the mirror back slightly so she could see herself looking down into it. She spread her legs just enough to examine herself, something else that she had never done before.

  The hair between her legs was short and slightly curled, and beneath, she could make out the fleshy parts of her sex. It looked and felt both familiar and alien to her.

  The thoughts in her head now turned to Duncan, and how it had felt to have his hands on her arms, and she reached down and explored herself with her right hand. She parted the sensitive folds of her outer lips and looked at the inner surfaces of her sex, and saw the glistening wetness there. She closed her eyes in pleasure as her fingers explored herself in ways that sent shivers from the base of her neck all the way down her body to the tips of her toes, and she reached out and clutched the mirror with her other hand to steady herself.

  Her breathing grew faster and heavier as she moved her fingers, back and forth, tracing the most sensitive parts of her sex, her thoughts racing through scenarios with Duncan holding her, caressing her, kissing her body, filling her with his manhood, and then as she imagined the last of these thoughts, she experienced a sensation unlike anything she had ever felt before. The feeling swept up and over her like an intense wave, and she couldn’t think and her breath came out in gasping moans, and her pleasure peaked so much that she lost control and dropped to her knees, pressing her face to the floor and flexing her feet and toes involuntarily.

  The waves of pleasure were like a radiant flower of light blossoming in her mind pulsing over and over, and she felt warm, and safe, and it enveloped her for whispers. Gradually, the waves ebbed and her breath returned and her muscles relaxed. When she felt calm again, she stood and looked at her naked body in the mirror, a light sheen of sweat visible on her chest and legs. She raised a hand and tilted the mirror back, and then padded over to her clothing and redressed herself.

  Her mother had explained how sex could lead to this kind of climax, as she had called it, but Catelyn realized how inadequate words were at describing the sensation. She felt herself blush again, this time at the thought of what she had just done, and she smiled, and whistled a tune to herself as she left the room of Ortis and returned to the room where her pack was, and spent the rest of her time thinking.

  She thought of her life up to this point, the people she’d met and loved, the things she had seen in her youth, and later had done alone without her eyesight. And she thought ahead to what awaited her in Belkyn, and eventually what might lay beyond the Wall, as she waited for nightfall.

  Catelyn cinched the pack on her back tighter, pulling it taut and shifting it so that the bulk of the weight of it sat above her hips. A part of her was still tingling from earlier, and she let a slight smile play upon her mouth at the memory. Looking back on it, she didn’t really know what had taken over her, but it had been wonderful. She had never imagined that she could ever feel that good, or be so swept away by something so powerful. Her sole experience with anything even remotely like that had been serious conversations about the topic with her mother, who wanted to prepare her daughter for the inevitable reality of human coupling. Because of her mother’s own experiences with the men of the Imperial army, there was almost always a sense of cool detachment when she talked about the subject. The exception was when she talked about how it was different between her and Catelyn’s father Tomas, but she chose not to explain how, only that it mattered more when you really cared for the person.

  Catelyn began to understand exactly what that meant. She didn’t have any such deeper feelings for Duncan specifically; she hardly knew him and she was aware that her reaction to his holding her was purely physical. But in that moment, it had been easy to imagine how it might feel to be more emotionally connected to someone in that way.

  She wondered if that would ever be possible for her, but sadly realized how unlikely that was. She chided herself for being so distracted, and refocused her attention on the task at hand. She was twelve blocks away from Ortis’ apartment, which she had left as soon as the sun had set, climbing to the roof with her pack slung to her back. She had been making her way along the dusty rooftops for the better part of three prayers, and she still had many more to go.

  Catelyn stood and angled herself sideways to make her way down the sloped roof she had come to rest on, her feet already blackened from the tarred roof tiles. One thing tha
t she had been mildly unprepared for as a result of regaining her sight had been seeing just how dirty her feet got as she maneuvered along the rooftops.

  Growing up barefoot, she was no stranger to dirt on her feet, but the thick blackness of the materials that she trod through routinely honestly took her by surprise. She would need to find a wash basin when they got through the Belkyn Channel to the warehouse where they would stay for a few days while they scouted the situation inside the city.

  Looking at her hands and arms, which were similarly already covered in soot and dirt stains, she realized that, in truth, she could use a full bath. She didn’t expect to have the opportunity to stop for such a luxury before she reached Belkyn proper, nor did she hold much optimism that such a thing would be ranked very high on the list of priorities for Ortis. She supposed that if the price to pay for his cooperation was a little dirt on her hands and feet, then she could handle it.

  She crossed from rooftop to rooftop, feeling the variety of surfaces under her feet and relishing the thrill of dancing with danger along the eaves and ledges of the Seat’s tall buildings. Now that she was able to see again, it reduced some of that pure adrenaline response of wondering whether her bubble was sending her off into some barrier she had failed to detect, or off into empty space or something similar. But her ability to predict a whole new direction with her eyes once more greatly increased the speed at which she could move, and Catelyn spent the first prayer after her departure sprinting as fast as she dared along the edges of buildings.

  It had made her heart race faster than she’d ever believed possible that it could beat, and she felt it was a fair trade for the uncertainty that had fueled her excitement before. Now that she could see the streets below her, she could tell just how high up she was, and that too filled her with feelings of exhilaration.

  It was not all fun for her though. She was spending that time also thinking about how the six of them would manage to cross through Belkyn, and pass out of the Grand Gate to the wider world beyond. She thought about Silena and her family, Erich and Sera and Elexia. She didn’t know how any of them were going to survive, nor what awaited them outside the Walls, but Catelyn had to admit that for once, the uncertainty of the unknown that waited for them was, in this case, better than the certainty that they would never be able to live within the Walls in safety again.

  And then, there was Ortis. As she leaped to a rickety, damaged and slanted roof, she shifted her weight subtly, dancing on the edge of a rotten wood slat. She pictured Ortis prostrated before her, his arms stretched wide, as she drove his dagger through his neck. The thought of it filled her with disgust, but she’d made him a promise. She hadn’t seen any other way to get him to agree to help them, and although she knew he deserved death and worse, she still had no clue why he had become so fixated on her being his executioner.

  She didn’t think she would be able to get out of her promise to him, but she still raced through the possibilities in her mind, trying to think of a way. She thought that she could simply abandon him once they reached Belkyn, or even at the Grand Gate, if she weren’t also going to be traveling with an older woman and two young girls.

  Ortis would almost certainly hunt her down for failing to uphold her part of their bargain. Silena hadn’t asked Catelyn what had changed her mind on the matter, but she was happy that the agreement had been struck. Catelyn knew that Silena wanted Ortis dead more than anyone, although she knew that her friend was even more concerned with getting the girls out of the Seat and starting their lives over outside the Walls.

  Catelyn realized, as she skittered across graveled slate tiles, that she had never once asked if the five of them would travel together, or whether Silena would wish to take her family to a settlement, or try to find an abandoned farmhouse somewhere and make a go of it on their own by living off of the land. Catelyn hadn’t really even thought about her own long-term plans outside the Walls, most likely because she didn’t think much of their odds of getting out alive.

  In the back of her head, Catelyn recognized that this effort of theirs might simply be an elaborate form of suicide, but the wheels were in motion now, and she would simply have to go wherever the wagon rolled.

  Something that Enaz had said in those last days before he had clawed his own throat open came bubbling up to the surface of Catelyn’s thoughts. Some of those memories were muted, and indistinct enough that she questioned their authenticity, but she remembered how he had spoken with such awe when he had told her about seeing the city of Freehold.

  Everything she knew about that place was from one of the books on history that she had read as a child, and according to the book, that city had been destroyed and abandoned long ago. Enaz claimed to have seen the walls of the city, and nothing about how he had described it indicated that the city had been destroyed. But she also knew that his words had quite possibly only been the ramblings of a man approaching his imminent death.

  This question also reminded her of something her father had once told her. She’d asked him once about some trivial bit of information that she had read in one of her books. Something so inconsequential to her that she couldn’t even remember what it was now, but that had confused her as a child. She had asked her father whether the fact in the book was true or not, and he’d responded with patience and kindness, as usual.

  “Catey, books are written by people, like you, me or your mother. The good ones try their best to tell the truth, just like we do. But there are books that lie too, just as people sometimes lie. One of the things you’ll need to learn as you get older is to tell the difference. To be able to tell when people, or books, are lying.”

  Catelyn believed that her father and mother had always told her the truth, even when it wasn’t pleasant. But there were times when Catelyn wondered whether what she knew, what she had been taught, both by her parents and the books they had provided for her were always telling the truth. What if Freehold hadn’t been destroyed, as the books said? What if Enaz had been telling the truth, that the city still stood, or had been rebuilt?

  She remembered Enaz’ last word, scrawled in his own blood on the stone wall of the cell where he had taken his own life. Free.

  As she approached the place where she was to meet Ortis, her plan long term plan for her life outside the Empire solidified in her mind. It might seem like a fool’s errand, but truthfully, she had no other plan, and so she made the decision that if she somehow survived to see the world outside of the Walls of the Empire, she would make her way toward Freehold, if for no other reason than to see with her own eyes, the fate of that fabled city.

  She landed on the rooftop above the warehouse that Ortis had chosen as their meeting place, and when she looked to the west, through the pre-dawn gloom she could see her next destination; the Belkyn Channel, leading off towards the city itself and at the far end of that, the Grand Gate.

  Catelyn could feel the pull of the outside world on her, like an invisible rope tugging at her waist, eager to release herself from this prison. She climbed down from the rooftop before the sun rose, and entered the red brick building Ortis had described to her before they had left his compound.

  Catelyn had never been to this part of the Seat before, and it was unlike anything she had expected. Most of the buildings here were intact, but long abandoned. The building she stood in now did indeed look to have been some type of warehouse, for there were massive empty bays, the floors strewn with detritus from sojourns of neglect and the walls lined with broken and barren loading platforms. Catelyn tried to imagine how big the wagons in the Before must have been, to have needed such space for their loading and unloading.

  The place smelled strongly of mildew, and the floor was covered with a thick sheen of oily dirt, and no tracks could be seen breaking the residue, indicating that no one had been here in a very long time. Her first instinct at seeing the building was that Ortis had chosen well. She scouted the place, careful to not leave any tracks of her own, at least on the floor where the
y would be obvious, but choosing to climb onto some metal railings and balancing her way across the room, turning it into a game of flitting from railing to railing and crossing the large open room towards a smaller office room without once touching the floor.

  She smiled at the victory when she landed at her destination, reveling in these small challenges she set for herself.

  As she reached the small office room, she predictably found it in a state of disrepair, and mostly barren, but for the splintered remains of a wooden desk that had long since been broken down for burnable firewood sojourns before. She began to feel a sense of confusion and wariness at the utter lack of any place for a small group of people to spend the night, and began to question her initial instinct as she returned to the warehouse floor.

  This place is abandoned, but that’s its only strength. Why would Ortis choose this place to stay? And where is he?

  Catelyn’s paranoia around trusting Ortis resurfaced, and she started to wonder if this wasn’t some sort of elaborate trap.

  Looking up, she saw metal scaffolding and expanded her bubble. She neither heard, nor smelled anyone nearby, and she climbed up a small ladder into the rafters above the warehouse floor. The metal beneath her hands and feet was covered with a green patina, some of it flaking away at her touch. She made her way to the corner of the warehouse, and found a spot high up on the scaffolding which gave her a vantage point to all the points of ingress, and removed her pack. She retrieved the lone blanket she had left with her, and placed her pack down on the metal scaffolding. She sat down on her pack gently, making sure that she was comfortable and the pack would be secure, then pulled the blanket over her.