7
Movement. Voices. A scream – her scream. White hot pain tore into Megs’s flank at the same time that something warm and wet trickled down her cheek and into her ear. It might tickle if the pain in her side wasn’t so overwhelming.
Megs forced her eyes open – and immediately wished she hadn’t. The world spun sickeningly, as if she’d had too much of Aldusa’s special brew. To make matters worse, her vision was clouded, like staring through smoky glass. A human shape stood above her, black and liquid, morphing like a shadow cast by a campfire. Too much movement. Megs was going to be sick. Bile rose in her throat. She squeezed her eyes shut again, and some survival instinct told her to force the bile down.
You’ll choke to death if you get sick right now,it said.
Flames. Megs could feel the heat blistering her skin, could smell the smoke, the oily kind of smoke that came from burning too much lantern oil all at once. She’d smelled that before, when mountain men had burned Eastern cities to the ground. The smoke was overwhelming. She couldn’t breathe.
But even as she opened her mouth to complain to someone – who? – that she couldn’t breathe, that she felt sick, that her side was on fire, that blood was in her ear, the darkness took her again.
Her mouth opened, but this time, no scream came.
The darkness was pleasant. Safe. It called to Megs, and she decided to follow it. Followed it, down into the black.
#
Pain woke her again, rudely jerking her from slumber back into the waking world. Someone prodded at her side, and each touch was a burning arrow, burrowing into her skin.
A voice above her. Muttering. But not in common tongue.
Megs stiffened, tried to push away the hands. They had her. The mountain men had her! They were torturing her! They would interrogate her, ask her where her people were, ask her where Azza was. But she would not break no matter what they did to her. She would die before she told them what they wanted to know.
“Nooooo,” she moaned, but it came out so quietly it was more whimper than defiance.
“Shhh,” said the voice. “I know it hurts, but you have to be still.”
Common tongue. Not the mountain man language.
And she knew that voice.
“Azza?”
“Shhh,” the voice said again.
Then nothing.
#
Megs was back in her tent with Azza, sleeping while the other woman hummed and stirred a pot of something that smelled delicious. The campfire outside crackled, and Megs could feel its heat warming her skin even from here. It didn’t make sense that she could feel it from this distance, but Megs couldn’t be bothered to figure the puzzle out. All that mattered was that she was here, and Azza was here, and soon they would eat. Azza was such a good cook. Even here, in the middle of the Sunrise Mountains, long separated from grain mills and proper ovens and cookware, Azza could make a feast out of the meanest of ingredients.
Megs felt herself drifting off again. A dream began, and in the dream it was a different woman who fed her, a woman with a mischievous glint in her eyes and a gap-toothed grin. Megs had lost that woman years ago; that was how she knew it was only a dream.
The sound of a ladle against a bowl popped the water bubble of the dream, and Azza walked over to where Megs lay. She held the bowl in one hand, put her other hand beneath Megs’s shoulders, levering her up into a sitting position.
It hurt. Oh, Mother Moon, how it hurt.
“Azza… no… not… I’m not hungry,” Megs said, closing her eyes against the sickening mix of dizziness and pain.
“Drink,” said Azza. “You need it.”
Azza put the bowl to Megs’s lips, tipped Megs’s head backwards, and began to pour the contents in. It was vile. Bitter and pungent and unsettlingly gritty. Megs gagged, coughing the first mouthful back up.
“No,” she said, weakly trying to push the bowl away.
But Azza was nothing if not determined. “Stop fighting me. You need this – trust me.”
And because it was Azza, and Megs did trust her, she drank.
#
Light. Bright and unforgiving, like lying on one’s back in a wheat field and staring straight up at the sun. Milton had dared her to do that once, when they were children.
“Bet I can look at it longer than you can without blinking,” he said.
Megs rolled her head to the side, surprised to see her big brother there, lying next to her, grinning in that impish way he had whenever he was about to tempt her into doing something she shouldn’t.
“Bet you can’t,” she replied.
And so they both started staring, and spots clouded her vision, and her eyes protested, and she blinked –
“You blinked!” Milton said.
“Did not,” she argued, even though she had. But then it dawned on her: if Milton could see her blink, then Milton wasn’t looking at the sun. She rolled over and punched him in the shoulder. “Cheater!” she said, the black spots swimming before her eyes turning Milton into odd, shadowy colors.
Milton cackled in delight.
The cackling kept going, rhythmic, repeating. It stopped, then started again.
That’s not Milton,Megs thought. And I’m not a child.
“Who’s Milton?” someone asked her.
The cackling started again. It was familiar. She listened to it.
“Megs? Are you awake?”
A chattering squirrel. That was what the cackling was. Not Milton. Milton was dead. Megs knew that for certain because she’d been the one who killed him.
“Megs?”
Megs lifted a hand to shield her eyes from the sunlight. Her hand was ever-so-slow in responding, like it was moving through a vat of honey.
Something moved above her, blocking the sun before her hand could. She blinked a few times, and the shape blocking the sun resolved into a face.
A cool, smooth palm gently rested upon her forehead. “I think your fever’s finally broken. Can you hear me?”
“Y-yes,” Megs croaked. The single word sounded like a rusty nail being pulled from a board. She squinted at the face. With the sun behind it, it was more shadow than anything else. It took a few seconds for the face to resolve into features, but once it did, Megs finally recognized who was hovering over her. It wasn’t Azza. “… Linna?”
The face split into a smile, the whites of Linna’s teeth shining out from the shadows. “That’s a first – you recognize me. Who’s Milton, anyway? Old boyfriend?”
“No. My brother.”