by Teresa Rook
Just a body.
I crawl onto her, and the extra height does it. I see the edge, the top where the sheer rock levels into a cliff-top. We’ve fallen down a sliver in the rock, a broad gash in the black stone.
I can't quite reach the edge. I crouch down and leap, but it’s not good enough. I have no traction in my right leg, and I lurch sideways, my fingers scrabbling far short of the cliff’s face. I slam against the smooth, slippery rock wall and slide down.
I tear strips of cloth from my shirt to tie around my hands, then climb back onto Meeree’s midsection. I take another leap and this time my hands find purchase. My arms ache as I lift myself up, and I'm outright sobbing by the time I can hook an elbow over the edge. I roll the rest of the way up and collapse there at the edge of the hole, with the mist screaming in my ears. I curl up and wait for silence to descend.
#####
A mounting sense of panic that increases for no apparent reason, the way it does in dreams. The older girl is nowhere to be seen, and I sense a great weight descending upon me. The toddler peeks inside garbage cans, into alleys, under small rocks, and between the cracks in the cobblestone.
She doesn’t understand she’s alone now.
twenty-three
I come to in a dark so deep that, for a moment, I mistake it for death. But then a dull full-body ache thumps to life, which quickly becomes a life-affirming agony along every inch of my skin. The pain makes me twist and writhe, which only agitates it. It feels like my flesh is being shorn away, slid off by razors. I try to hold still and get a look at myself, but it’s too dark.
I’m lying on my back, and it’s not on the ground. There’s something soft beneath me, a cot or a bundle of blankets. My eyes slowly begin to adjust, and I see a jagged spot of brightness in the ceiling, a hole where rays of sunlight filter down to illuminate the black craggy rock of the wall. So, I’m underground. Again.
I try to stand, slowly this time, and find that my right leg is completely immobilized. A different pain radiates from the limb, a deeper, pulsing pressure. I feel something hard pressed against it, a splint. That’s right. I broke it in the fall.
And Meeree. Oh, Meeree.
I choke back a sob for the horse I refused to get to know. Holding myself at a distance protects nobody. They get hurt whether I love them or not.
Sunlight filters into the little cave, illuminating the clutter around me. Boxes and sheets of tin stand in for furniture, obscuring some of the black stone walls. Small jars line every surface. A bowl sits on a box to my right, a dirty rag hanging over its edge. I mean to reach over my head and grab it, but the action tugs hard on the bandages that cover me head to toe. If I think about it, I can still feel the burning. I shudder. Who has brought me here, and why?
It’s a chore to pull myself across the room to the opening in the ceiling, and then to pull myself up along the uneven rock, my bad leg dragging against the wall. I throw a pair of crutches up before me, a pair I nearly tripped over getting off my cot. When I emerge into the day, it’s blinding, and I need to take another moment to adjust.
The first thing to come into focus is the peaks and spires of Ventrin, clearer and closer than ever, straight ahead of me. I take a deep breath and hoist myself up on the crutches.
The ground here is black and shiny, and it’s difficult to manoeuver my crutches over their slick surface. It dips and rises in waves, tiny hills that crest just high enough to hide their valleys. Anyone could be hiding anywhere in this jagged landscape, as rough and choppy as the roiling sea. My little cave is just a valley in the rock covered over with a sheet of tin. I count eight other tin roofs as I make my way across the rock, towards Ventrin rising in the distance.
And then, abruptly, it ends, and I’m left staring at a wide chasm between me and my destination. The ground just drops off in front of me, the bottom invisible beneath layer after layer of shooting, swirling mist. The background noise I’ve been hearing in my head snaps to the forefront and makes sense of itself: steam vents. Hot air that hisses as it finds release from the earth. That’s what the screaming was. That’s what I was chasing. That’s what my horse died for. Frustration presses down on me hard. I shouldn’t try to be a hero.
I turn left and follow the cliff. It takes me further away from Ventrin, so I turn right and go that way; same thing. I’m on a raised plateau, and the only way to Ventrin is down.
So, I lower myself onto my belly—an action that tugs horribly at the bandages on my torso—and peer over the edge. I see a path down, a rough, zig-zagging line of black rock that juts out from the cliffside. I force myself to my feet and find the spot where it comes closest to the top, and I drop my crutches onto the ledge. Then I dangle above it and lower myself with my arms, but I’m not quite tall enough. There’s still space between my feet and the jutting rock.
I clench my jaw and squeeze my eyes shut, but no amount of mind-over-matter can prepare me for the pain of landing on my crushed leg. It folds beneath me, the joint pressed far past its current range of motion. I scream, but it’s not just pain. I collapse and the momentum has me rolling, and on a ledge as narrow as this, I feel a very real fear. I knock into the crutches and they pitch off the edge, disappearing into the mists. I will roll off the edge and be like Meeree on the rocks below.
But I scrabble at the edge as my body rolls off it, and I manage to hoist myself back up, my arms straining, the skin beneath their bandages tearing and sliding around. I lay on my back, breathing hard.
“So, you really were trying to die.”
The voice startles me. Just above me, I make out a pair of legs dangling over the edge.
“Who’s there?” I croak, but she doesn’t answer.
#####
By the time I’ve hauled myself back onto the top of the plateau, the sun has nearly set and there’s no longer anybody sitting at the precipice. My legs will not support any weight, so I crawl along my belly back to the cave where I woke up. I feel hot tears streaming across my cheeks as I go, and more than once I have to stop and bite hard at the insides of cheeks to stop from screaming. My bandages are soaked with blood, and every little movement is a searing pain. I somehow get myself back to my little cave and crawl up onto my cot. Eventually hunger pangs join the myriad pains of the day. I don’t sleep so much as surrender consciousness.
When next I open my eyes, I’m not alone. My head has been propped up against a rough sack, and an old woman sits beside me with a bowl and spoon in hand.
“Are you awake this time?” she says in a voice that’s stern but not unkind.
I try to croak out a question, but my throat is too hoarse.
“Hush,” she tells me. “I didn’t mean for you to answer. Just rest for now. Cahrdre tells me you were up and about a few days ago. I’m sure you figured this out on your own, but that was unwise.” She sets down the bowl and reaches for my shoulder. I cringe away, but she only lifts the edge of a bandage. It sticks to my skin as she peels it up. She makes no reaction, just sets the bandage gently back in place. “You’ll be fine, but you need to be still for some time yet.”
She picks the bowl back up and approaches my face with the spoon. I take a deep breath, swallow my pride, and open my mouth.
An endless stretch of days progress in this manner. I lie in bed and the old woman visits me to bring food and water, interludes I am increasingly aware of as my body begins to heal and I spend more and more time in the waking world. I itch to get off this cot, out of this cave, but my skin feels dry and cracked, and I’m afraid to split it open and have all my blood come pouring out again. And my leg—I don’t even want to think about my leg. Whatever progress it had made towards healing I undid when I dropped from that ledge. What was I thinking?
I was thinking that I had to get to Ventrin before Ennis and Riksher. I groan. What will they do to the trains if they get there first?
I learn the old woman tending to me is Arahna, and that Cahrdre is her granddaughter. I don’t see the girl, and Arahna is
strange when she mentions her, tight-lipped and far-eyed. Worry lines her face, and I wonder if she’s truly as old as she looks with her thin, frizzy white hair and gnarled spine.
At first, she avoids leaving me while I’m awake, but as my strength increases and consciousness sticks for longer and longer, it becomes inevitable. I’m always seized by a sense of acute loneliness, as though I in this cave am the only thing left alive. And only barely living, at that; my crushed leg is the least of my worries. I’d practically roasted in that hole, and my entire outer layer is dead or dying. It takes time to grow a whole new skin, and the old one cracks and sheds with an agonizing slowness, often too early thanks to an overeager gesture on my part. Then the too-new skin under it scabs up, and I must wait even longer.
I take a strange comfort in the knowledge that once I’ve healed, I’ll be an entirely different person than I was before, at least on the outside.
Arahna returns several times a day with water and twice a day with food, always stew. It’s heartier than anything I’ve tasted before, easily the best meal I’ve had since Barnab, and the meat gives me the energy I eventually use to hoist myself off the cot. My leg, splinted in three places and bound tight, has receded to a dull throbbing. It’s still just a useless club, but Arahna has made me another set of crutches for when I’m ready to stand again.
I delicately peel the bandages from around my forearms and wrap them around my knuckles. My exposed arms are red and puckered, but this skin is new. There are black patches stuck to the inside of the bandages, the last bits of charred flesh rubbed off on the fabric. I flex my fingers and pull my hands into fists. Still hurts, but feels familiar. Feels safe.
“Hello, Darga,” Arahna says. I carefully turn on my crutches to see her standing behind me, a large jar cradled in her arms. My throat isn’t back to a hundred percent, but I’ve been able to croak out my name, at least.
I mime drinking and she frowns, then points to her left. “There’s a well. We’ve already pulled for today, but if you can get more water from it, you’re free to drink.”
Her skepticism is well-earned. The well is little more than a deep rift in the stone, a sharp crack that goes down and down much farther than I can make out. I heave on a tattered rope and eventually the bucket appears, barely a mouthful of water at its bottom. I swish it around in my mouth before swallowing, and then I return to Arahna.
“Thank you,” I say. “For sharing.”
She shrugs. “I rarely get the chance to. Few travelers out this way.” She tilts her head. “So far from the tracks.”
So, she wants to know what I’m doing here, how I’ve managed to wander so far from relative safety. Who I am, to have come out here unafraid.
Or afraid. Arahna seems to understand, I think, that having accomplished something is not evidence of a lack of fear for it. She must have done much to survive out here, and for an old woman, it can’t have been easy.
But when I try to speak again, I can only cough. Arahna places a hand on my shoulder and smiles. It’s okay, she says with her kind, grandmotherly eyes. It’s all going to be okay.
twenty-four
A few days later, I see Cahrdre for the first time. The girl sits at the edge, where she was on my first venture out. I gaze at the vast misty chasm before us.
“Pretty, I know,” Cahrdre says without looking at me.
I sit beside her and dangle my own legs over the edge. We're high enough that I feel only a slight heat from the steam, but I definitely feel the humidity. I resist the urge to run a hand over my hair. It feels glued to my skull with sweat, but I’m sure the top layer has frizzed out in a halo like Cahrdre’s. “Not sure I'd say it's pretty.”
She turns to me with no humour in her face. “Right. You skipped that phase and went right to the part where it almost boils you to death.”
I shiver at the memory. My skin where I've peeled off the bandages has mostly flaked off, leaving healthy new skin underneath. It hurts, but nothing like it did at first. “Thanks for your help.”
“That was Arahna.”
I give her a sideways smile. “Arahna is how old? I get the feeling you had more to do with my rescue than you're letting on.”
“No, actually.” She says it with a straight face. “I was going to leave you out there. Arahna pulled you all the way up here by herself.”
I blink. “Oh.”
“Yeah. You were so close, you know? You almost had it, but you climbed out.”
A strange pounding begins at the base of my throat. I clear it noisily. “Almost had what?”
“I were you, I would have stayed down.”
I find myself edging away from her. “I didn't fall on purpose.” My memory from that day is hazy, but I’m sure I didn’t do it on purpose. I’ve never wanted to do it on purpose.
I squeeze my eyes closed. “I killed my horse.”
Cahrdre shrugs. “You do what you have to. Sometimes people get hurt.”
She says it with a perfect nonchalance, a tone that says to me she’s made choices like this before. The pounding intensifies, and it has nothing to do with the oppressively humid air. She twists a lock of hair around her fingers, looks idly down at the split ends, and releases it, returning her gaze to the emptiness in front of us.
People get hurt. Should I be afraid of her? She looks harmless enough, a stick-like, sun-browned girl with thick frizzy hair and a freckled, upturned nose. She looks young, but not innocent. She’s frighteningly calm.
“Where's Arahna?” I ask. My fingertips press against the smooth rock, steadying me. Finding purchase. Preparing for a fight.
She’s just a little girl, no older than fifteen. Gods. I force my fingers to uncurl.
“She's fine,” Cahrdre says, not looking at me. She exhales strongly through her nose. “She's always fine.”
#####
And Arahna is fine when I find her later, after I’ve returned to my temporary bed and changed my own bandages. My things are all stashed in a box, rifled through but unharmed, and nothing missing. I pick up the empty canteen and set it back down.
Arahna is stooped under one of the many tin roofs that cover caves just like mine, dotted along the plateau. I duck in behind her, my hip crunching with the manoeuver. I brace a hand against the bare wall and take a few deep breaths.
The entire cave is stacked with jars, and she seems to be counting them. “Cahrdre,” I say, the name squeaking out.
Arahna stills, then resumes her inventory. “Ah,” she says. “You two spoke. How did she seem?”
“She seemed…ah…”
“Don't dance around it. How was Cahrdre?”
“Scary.”
Arahna nods. “Cahrdre was born at an unfortunate time.” She straightens, wincing as the old joints in her knees crack one by one. “She has trouble seeing worth in the world.”
We emerge from the cave, and I glance to the edge of the plateau, the girl’s silhouette framed by a now-setting sun. She hasn’t moved. “It’s all talk, right? She's just a teenager. She wouldn't actually hurt herself. Or—”
“Me?” Arahna smiles. “Maybe she would. That's why I keep an eye on her.”
“That's why you saved me. To show that you can. And will. It wasn't about me at all. It was about Cahrdre.”
“Clever girl.”
I bite my lip. “Thank you anyways. Still.”
She smiles without looking at me. “Maybe it was a tiny bit about you.”
#####
Cahrdre finds me some weeks later, throwing punches at the air under the stars. My stamina is slowly increasing. I can go for more than a few minutes without needing to sit down, and I can be off my crutches for brief periods if I keep most of my weight on my good leg. I’m getting restless here, knowing I’m getting better but frustrated that I’m not better now. When I lose my balance and fall—hard, because I can’t catch myself on my bad leg—I lie on the ground, first stunned, then depressed. I can’t change anything if I can’t make my body work. Riksher and
Ennis will beat me to Ventrin, and they’ll find a way to destroy the trains. Then what will happen to my tribe? Will they starve while I waste away on this plateau?
Is Mhyra counting on me to save them, or has she always known I was weak? I bet she wrote me off the second she heard I’d left for Salis. She knew nothing would come of me.
This is how Cahrdre finds me.
“We're almost out of food,” she says.
I take a deep breath through my nose to calm my own emotions, then shake my head. “That can't be right. All those jars Arahna is always carrying around.” It seems like every time I see Arahna she’s got an armful of them, carting jars from one cave to the next, endlessly organizing. It’s the same stew for every meal every day, but I’m not complaining.
“Have you actually gotten down in one of those caves and looked? They're all empty. We've got a quarter of one left. Arahna spends all her time down there, hoping we've missed some. But we haven't. Everything is gone.”
I sit up slowly. She’s right, I’ve never looked that closely. All an act on Arahna’s part, then? Trying to look busy, bustling like everything’s okay. “And she's been sharing it with me.”
Cahrdre smiles thinly, the same smile I’ve seen on Arahna. Amusement, I think. Wry and silent. “Don’t go thinking it’s all charity. You brought us meat. Of course Arahna will share.”
“What?”
Oh. Oh.
My strength leaves me and I sprawl back on the warm stone, head spinning, nausea bubbling up from the evening meal still making its way through my body, fueling me, giving me the strength to heal.
Cahrdre laughs at my shock, but it's not an unkind sound. “Would you rather she rotted away down there?”
“I…no. No, this is better. I just feel bad. I never thought she was worth anything, but she’s been keeping me alive for weeks.”
“You're pretty dramatic.”
Now's my turn to laugh. “Says the girl obsessed with death.”
