Pain. Numbness. Pain again. Darkness.
The whistle of the wind over deep, deep pots.
And then voices.
“What were you hoping to accomplish?”
“Damn it, Donal…I don’t know. I was angry. I wanted to escape. I knew we needed Chordwain dead. I was just…just trying to make it all work.”
“‘Was’ angry?”
“Fine, I am angry. I’m angry at her for changing. I’m angry at Ragna for existing. I’m angry at Shraeven for hurting her. I’m angry at you for being a man. I’m angry at life for being so damned difficult.”
A sigh then. Such a soft sigh. “Silfia—”
“Look, I did the best I could with what I had—” She’s crying now. “And…and I’m scared she’s not going to wake up, and it’ll all be for nothing...”
Comfort her, Donal. I don’t think I can make a sound yet.
* * *
I lose the world for a while then. When I wake next, it’s to warm, soft arms cradling my head. I am flat on my stomach, so numb I wonder what they drugged me with.
“Welcome home,” Ragna murmurs.
“Uhn,” I say, all eloquence.
My tent is washed in sepia shadows and faint yellow candle-light, straight flames spearing the still, close air. I feel as if the world had been sealed away, leaving me in this comfortable cocoon. Silfie is sleeping on the floor nearby; I can smell her, familiar and comforting. It takes me a while longer to sense Donal on a sleeping mat unrolled across the entrance, barring it.
“Am I alive?” I manage then.
“Yes,” Ragna says.
“Ah,” I say and lapse into silence. My head is in her lap as well as her arms. No wonder I feel safe. But eventually I come up with a new question. “Why hasn’t she woken up?”
“I made her tea,” Ragna says.
I roll an eye up to look at her.
“She was hysterical,” Ragna says. “She was doing no one good, least of all herself, crying almost to vomiting.”
“And Donal?”
She smiles. “He knew the tea would make him sleep. He looked at me, looked again, and then drank it.”
Good to know my people trust one another. Some of them, anyway. I sigh a little. “The camp?”
“Will be much relieved when you walk out of this tent on both feet,” Ragna says. “Negrat and Gavan have been calming them.”
“And the enemy—”
“Confused,” she says. “They have withdrawn to the city.”
Wonderful. I would have to pry them out again. I sigh. Then, “I…I don’t suppose I’ll be able to fly again.”
“The mongrel healer says you should recover,” she says.
That is more than I was given to expect. Particularly since I hadn’t anticipated being alive at all. “Chordwain is dead.”
“Yes,” she says.
“Gods,” I say. “What an unholy mess.”
Even after all this time living among us, Ragna still smells of pine and musk and primal things, just as she did when I met her on that mountain. She is brushing her thumb against my cheek. I think of those first days.
“Ragna,” I murmur. “Do you remember…the stones and bones?”
“That Negrat read for you,” she says. “Of course.”
“Tell me again,” I say. “I think…I think I’ve forgotten. I should have written it down, but the moment was so intense, so portentous, I thought I would never forget it…and I have.”
She smiles.
“Does that happen to you?” I ask, rolling an eye up to look at her.
“Of course,” she murmurs. “I too am mortal, and things slip from me.”
“But not the divination,” I say.
“No,” she says, and quotes, and I can hear Negrat’s cadence in the words: “You. Your company. Your challenge. Your future if you decline. Your future if you accept. The end of all things.” She pauses. I realize she is remembering this exactly as it happened, and I feel a touch of wonder. “You, the Phoenix. Your company, the Thunderstorm. Your challenge: the Betrayal. Your future if you decline…Death. Your future if you accept…the Quest. And the end of all things—”
“—Sovereignty,” I breathe, remembering. I recover my sense of humor. “Well, not much choice between those two…Death or Sovereignty.”
Ragna arches her whiskers. I’m glad to have made her laugh.
“Do you suppose I was the betrayer?” I ask.
She says, “Or perhaps the betrayal is yet to come.”
“Mmm,” I say, glancing toward the tent flap.
She follows my gaze.
“Just making sure Negrat isn’t about to pop out of the shadows,” I say.
That gets me a chuff along with the arched whiskers.
“Either way,” she murmurs, “we approach the end of all things, Angharad. You know this.”
“Yes,” I say. And smile. “Glad you’re here to see it with me, od Ragna.”
“I am glad I came,” she says. “Mistress Governor Godkin Woman.”
I am just thinking of how nice it is to be in Ragna’s very softly furred, very solid arms when the tent flap parts at its base and the corvid messenger waltzes, all insouciance, inside…over the top of Donal’s body. Donal jerks upright, scanning for the intruder with a knife in his hand, only to fasten his eyes on the bird swaying over toward me.
“By the six blue horns of the bull god!” Donal says. “Did he just walk over me?”
I can’t help it. I start laughing, a choked whistle around my bandages.
Ragna arches her whiskers.
“Uhn,” Donal mutters and rolls onto his knees and from there to his feet. I’m not in the habit of noticing his body but he moves it so well, cutting through the sepia shadows, so sinuous. It distracts. I wonder what I look like when I move, what it says about me. Probably that I am old, creaky and wounded. I smile and look down at the corvid messenger.
“Well?”
He hops up onto the edge of my cot. Ragna is the one who unfolds the message and scans it.
“What’s it say?” Donal asks, having come to crouch alongside, shading Silfie’s face.
“It’s from Nedwin,” Ragna says. “He wants to meet with you, Angharad. To see if you live. And to discuss…irregularities.”
Wonderful. “When?”
“He doesn’t suggest.”
I sigh.
“How exactly did you come to have this message?” Donal asks the bird, who preens a wing and ignores him. I wonder myself.
“How badly off am I?” I ask. “I can tell I’m drugged. How badly?”
“I don’t think you’ll want to be walking around tomorrow,” Donal says. “You’re…ah…not entirely whole.”
I glance at him. He looks at Ragna. Along with the corvid messenger’s seeming ease with the enemy, I begin to wonder just what has been passing between Donal and Ragna in my absence.
Ragna twists to reach behind herself, toward the stand where she keeps my grooming tools. “Your knife?” she asks Donal, and he hands it to her. She positions its broadest surface near my eyes and then tilts my mirror over my back.
I stare in shock at the slice of myself reflected in the blade.
“My gods,” I whisper.
Swallowing takes a long time when you have a neck as long as mine. Particularly when you are doing it because your throat has gone dry from tongue to collarbones.
“Branden says I’ll recover?” I ask, hoarse.
“Yes, with care,” Ragna replies. The giant crevice in my back vanishes from the surface of Donal’s blade. She sets the mirror back on the table.
“Gods!” I whisper. “Was she trying to cut my wing off completely?”
“She would have had to dig around a little more to manage that,” Donal says with a crooked smile.
“Ah…how much laudanum am I on, precisely?” I asked.
They looked at one another.
“Oh, enough,” I said finally. “What is it with you two?”
This time Ragna was the one who smiled with her whiskers. Donal said, “She’s a practical woman. I like practical women.”
“If you steal my squire’s virtue,” I say, “I’ll—”
“Horse-whip me?” Donal says innocently. “Draw-and-quarter me? Throw me in the stocks and pelt me with Magwen’s excellent food!”
“That would be a waste of his cooking,” I say with asperity.
“Exactly,” he says. “It would break my heart.”
Ragna chuffs a laugh and Donal says, “Don’t worry, Mistress. We’re not bedmates. We have a stronger bond by far.”
“And that is?” I ask.
“We’re your nursemaids,” he says, and ducks when I lift an arm. And then I squawk and tears flood my eyes, because that arm is connected to that wing and that deep rift in my back and it hurts by all that’s holy, gods! Does it hurt!
“Fine nursemaids,” I say as they hover. “Beating you for insolence renders me insensate.”
Donal laughs—softly, I notice even while my head swims—and Ragna covers me with a blanket. There is a cup with a spout at my beak; one of them is tipping my head back, the other is pouring. The last thing I see is the corvid messenger’s bright, bright eye.
“Sleep, Mistress,” Donal says. “We’ll figure Nedwin out tomorrow.”