Page 114 of Mother of Death and Dawn

TISAANAH

The injuries were worse than I had let on to Klasto, Blif, and Max. The truth was, when we returned to the others, I could barely move. At least Sammerin healed the burns easily. He didn’t bother to scold me, though he did give me that disapproving “Don’t-think-I-don’t-see-you”look that he gave all his uncooperative patients.

Ishqa was not pleased that we had left. He proposed that we go back tomorrow with Sammerin present to make things, as Ishqa put it, “safer.” I was more than willing, but Max was steadfast.

“Absolutely fucking not,” he’d say, every time the topic was broached. “She could have died.”

These days, I regularly confronted my own mortality. So what?

A part of me was secretly glad, though, that we didn’t return to Klasto and Blif right away. A knot in my stomach persisted through the rest of the day at the thought of what I had witnessed. Max’s body. His mind. Yes, the tattoos had been rendered useless, but the ink would cover him forever. I knew how it felt for someone else’s will to alter your body without permission. He would have to think about Nura, and what she did to him, every time he looked at his own skin.

And even that, as horrible as it was, was nothing compared to what I had seen in his mind. It was a patchwork of scars and walls, either markings of a vicious wound or the defensive measures raised to prevent another one. I was so close to the man I loved, close enough to cradle the precious pieces of everything that made himhim.

And yet, that also meant that I was also close enough to see how badly he had been hurt—been hurt by me, intentionally or not.

I was quiet for the rest of the evening. I didn’t want to open my mouth for fear of what might come pouring out. We got rooms in a dilapidated inn—if it could even be called that—and went our separate ways early. Sammerin was the first to go. Zagos was a strange place, but it was a real city, and not one that was in the midst of a war. Sammerin was eager to disappear into a dark room full of beautiful strangers.

“This place is dangerous,” I said to him, as he slipped off into the streets. “Don’t get yourself killed.”

He gave me a tiny smirk over his shoulder that scolded me for not knowing him at all.

Ishqa, of course, disappeared again and declined to tell us where to. Brayan retreated to his room, and Max to his shortly after. But I had no interest in sleep.

A few doors down the street, I found a pub that seemed like it had once been a library—books lined the walls, stuffed into the crevices between cracks and crumbled stone. Most were written in languages I didn’t recognize, let alone understand, and time or water had long ago destroyed their legibility even if I did.

Still, the place was quiet, occupied only by an old man with a scarred face who looked like he was halfway to the grave. He spoke neither Aran nor Thereni, so I gesticulated through a request for…something. What I got was a cracked wine glass full of clear, hot liquid. One sip burned all the way down to my stomach. It was, by a significant margin, the strongest alcohol I had ever tasted.

Right now, I wasn’t sure that I minded all that much.

The pub-slash-library was divided into many little rooms—by nature of its placement in ruins that forced it to accommodate their shape—and I kept walking until I found a tiny, secluded spot in the back. There, I drank and practiced. For hours, I watched white butterflies of light sputter to life and wither away in my palms.

Useless, yes, but at least it wassomething. That was more than I had before. Whatever Max and I had done had been partially successful.

But those walls…

Butterflies lived and died in my hands, over and over and over again.

My drink was three-quarters finished when I heard footsteps. I looked up to see Max leaning against the doorframe, watching me.

I started. “How long have you been here?”

Confusion briefly crossed his face, and I realized that in my drunkenness, I’d spoken in Thereni without thinking.

“Short minute,” he replied, in heavily accented Thereni.

My throat bobbed. I hadn’t been expecting that—for him to remember Thereni.

“I’m sorry,” he said in Aran, as he sat beside me. “That’s more or less all I can say. Yes, no. Big, small. The colors. That sort of thing. I don’t know why I know it.”

I did.

“What about the curse words?” I said. “Thereni has very good curse words.”

“Enlighten me.”

I did, and Max repeated the phrase with hilariously intense concentration.

“Beautiful,” I declared.

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