Wing & Nien

by Shytei Corellian

  Wing.

  Nien’s mouth gaped as he tried to move through the emotion. The memories of Wing were the most difficult. But they were also the most comforting, for in them remained a glimmer of hope. Wing had not been in the castle. There was a chance, however small, that he’d survived.

  Brother, Nien whispered in the silence of his brain.

  With a half-shuddered sob, he slid his chin into his chest and breathed.

  Wing, what happened to you? Nien asked, and there was a part that genuinely believed through his connection with Wing he might receive an answer. Where are you? Tears burned hot in the back of his eyes. Did you make it out of Rieeve?

  Nien uncurled and shoved himself over onto his back.

  Staring up at the ceiling, he closed his eyes and whispered a wish he dared not hold in his hands, “Brother, if you made it out, if you’re out there somewhere, I’m right here.

  “Find me.”

  Chapter 51

  Cabin in the Clearing

  W ing awoke to find first moon nearly full in the night sky. A spontaneous sigh of gratitude escaped him for this smallest and most natural gift. He was unsure how much time had passed, but the rain had abated and though he still felt utterly wasted from chills and dehydration, the cessation of bad weather renewed his spirits enough to get him to his feet. From there, he’d sought water.

  Gazing into the stream where he drank, seeing only the hollowed cheeks and vacant eyes, he realized that he might have been looking at anyone. Anyone but himself. Shockingly thin in body and face, his clothes were ragged and repugnant and he was afraid might soon attract larger creatures than rodents while he slept. Worst of all was that the inspiring strength he’d had in his possession only a few short turns ago was all but spent.

  That, too, he thought. Take it all.

  Before the illness had set upon him, the fear that he was hopelessly lost in the mountains and might never find Legran had gripped him madly, but now apathy had taken over, held in check only by his vow to deliver the Plan to Master Monteray.

  He could curl back up under the ledge but was afraid if he did, sick as he was, he would never rise again.

  So, he moved on.

  Scraping pulp from the bark of trees, he chewed upon it through the day as he trudged on. He’d take more whenever he needed to rest — which he found himself needing to do more and more often. If he did not make it to Legran soon, there would be nothing left of him to hand over Commander Lant’s Plan.

  That evening, Wing forced himself to make a fire. The cold was bitter and never-ending. He’d begun to hate it with a depth he’d never thought was possible toward an inanimate thing. Except that it felt animated, as if it were in possession of the fiercest of egos. Well, he’d defy it tonight, even if in the smallest of ways. Beneath a sparse stand of thick, evergreen trees, he found shredded nest materials and plenty of dry bark scraps. Mercifully, a spark took quickly and Wing breathed life into it. Weak and fragile as he felt, the fire lifted his spirits. Staring into the flames, he leaned forward to feed another handful of branches to his fire and felt the edge of something inside his coat press into his ribs. Reaching into the pocket, he withdrew the leather-bound copy of the Ancient Writings he’d been making for himself, and for, he had hoped, his own family. Looking at the book, myriad emotions rose and fell within him as the stars moved slowly overhead and the fire flickered up against overhanging tree boughs. With his long fingers, Wing held it, feeling the leather texture, staring at the feathered, slightly uneven page edges. Then, with a flick of the wrist so fast it was imperceptible between the dance of flame and shadow, he tossed it into the fire.

  With a vacant, tired expression, he watched the flames lick over the smooth leather cover.

  “You came,” Wing said to the disembodied messenger who had stopped him from going into the castle that night. “But you came too late.”

  By the time the sun had climbed to its highest point the next day, Wing was staggering numbly. He was shivering again, and yet felt too hot, hot enough to find it very difficult not to shed his clothes and press himself into the blessed cold of the snow under his feet.

  You’re delirious, he thought to himself. Probably, he answered. Was he sick again or still? The fever had returned, possibly. Maybe it had never gone away.

  Managing a walking gait, his breath coming hard as only a long-distance run would have done a few turns earlier, Wing drove on as if in a trance.

  Night came slowly across the ridges and peaks, enveloping the sky with a sweet calm. First moon rose high and full, second moon on its tail — a gentle blue glow that glittered through the atmosphere.

  The light of the moons drew his attention. “Just us,” he said to them. “Where to sleep tonight?” For all it mattered, he could sit down right where he was, lay over, and let the snow cover him into the deep, hopefully warm, sleep of death.

  Moving ahead a bit more, he stepped out into a small but elegant clearing and drew up short. On the other side, sat a stout little cabin, its shadow shocking and beautiful in the night’s luminescence.

  Wing blinked, not believing his eyes.

  A cabin.

  He’d never heard that people lived in the mountains.

  Unless...

  Nien had once said there were tradesmen who lived nomadically, traveling valley to valley. Perhaps this was one of them. But why would a nomad build such a permanent structure?

  The structure.

  Unsure he could trust his fevered eyesight, Wing thought the cabin bore a striking resemblance to Rieevan architecture in design, if not materials.

  Drawing back into the tree line surrounding the clearing, Wing began to make his way toward the cabin.

  Stumbling over clumps of snow and shrub, Wing stopped again at a short distance. Light from within caused the window shutters to glow and Wing felt that orange light blush inside him as if radiating from a forgotten wish. Bending down, he scooped up a rock and, checking his aim, tossed it at the door. As the rock bounced off the door and tumbled across the deck, Wing folded back into the shadowed edge of the clearing to watch.

  An old man, thinning rusty-red beard reaching down from his face, appeared in the doorway. He looked around and then went back inside.

  Though he did not look Rieevan (and Wing had no idea what the Legranders looked like), the desperately old man did not appear dangerous, and he was clearly not Ka’ull.

  Exhaustion and pain superseded any further thoughts of wariness; Wing approached the cabin.

  Leaning upon the door’s wooden frame, he rapped lightly.

  On the other side, something fell and something banged and this time the old man appeared in the doorway with a worn hardwood stick in his hand. “All right, Jassup, let’s get on with it. One of us is going to get some sleep tonight.”

  Jassup? Wing thought. Did he say Jassup?

  Jassup was a Rieevan word used, particularly, when cursing at an animal.

  Pushing himself erect and into the light pouring out of the cabin, Wing’s tall frame filled the doorway.

  The man started, his scowl vanishing.

  An embodiment of the mountains, the old man’s face was stony and hard. His hair was like the red-rock of the sunsetting slopes of the Ti Range and his eyes were the colour of a Kojko storm — heavy grey set against the deepest blue. Had Wing not been on the verge of fainting he might have noticed the momentary expression of astonishment that sparked across those stormy eyes...

  But he could barely stand.

  “What is this?” the old man asked.

  This time the language was vaguely recognizable as the Fultershier, but after so long with only his own voice for company, the grating tone of the man’s accusation astonished Wing’s senses. It took an uncomfortably long time to piece together a reply in the strange tongue Nien had tried so often to teach him: “Please, if you would…”

  “Go away,” came the succinct reply that Wing had no problem translating.

  Wing went to speak ag
ain, to plead his cause, but his strength failed entirely and sinking to his knees, he collapsed headlong across the doorframe.

  For a time, the old man did not move, did not speak, his eyes softening as he took in the tall form now lying unconscious in the doorway to his cabin.

  “Son of the Mesko Tender,” he said at last in a language Wing would have understood intimately had he been conscious. “What brings you way out here? How in the name of the world did you find me?”

  Stepping around Wing’s prostrate form, he rolled Wing onto his back, tucked his arms beneath Wing’s shoulders and pulled him into the cabin. “I thought you were that old wapa again. I was about to knock your head in.” He laid Wing in front of the fireplace with a grunt. “I’m glad I didn’t.”

  Stoking up the fire for light and the heating of water, the old man looked Wing over. His lips, hands and feet were cracked, bleeding and swollen. The back of his shoulders, hips and knees, anywhere bone was thin with flesh, bore heavy bruising. A deep gash in his right arm was oozing with infection, and his eyes and cheeks were sunken and drawn.

  The broad shoulders and big bones spoke only reminiscently of a man once strong.

  Getting him out of a mountain of heavy clothing, the old man stoked his fire high. Wing’s forehead was burning with fever, his limbs trembling with long, rolling chills that shook his frame head to foot.

  The old man cleansed the gash in his arm, splashed and bandaged his feet and hands, and after preparing a poultice, served the rest of Wing’s bruised body with it.

  Moonsteps later, Wing lay on a bed of blankets in front of the fireplace, his face pale and still, but his body dressed in heavy tear-free clothing and his wounds bound up.

  The old man knelt beside him, pressing a cool cloth to Wing’s forehead, recalling images of the man who had once filled the emaciated form.

  “Not you, too,” he said as he pulled a blanket up over Wing’s chest. “I know a body can die out there, but I’ll wager your problems sit much deeper than anything physical.” He shook his head, saying to himself, “Look what you’ve gotten yourself into now, Rhusta.”

  With surprising gentleness, he pushed a stray black hair away from Wing’s face.

  “Merehr,” he said quietly. “What have they done to you?” And suddenly, Rhusta was no longer an old man but a young boy, sitting at his father’s feet near the fireplace for the nightly reading of the Ancient Writings and saying with all the gripping faith of a child, “I’ll meet him someday, Fa.”

  His father’s eyes had shifted to meet his, and Rhusta had been able to see the kindling of concern in his father’s brow, the tremble in the hand that smoothed the leathered surface of the book beneath age-old fingertips.

  “It’s a nice thought,” his father had managed to say after a moment.

  Rhusta remembered asking him: “Do you wish you could see him? Meet him?” And his father had replied, “Yes, I guess I do.”

  Rhusta had become excited then, telling his father, “I’ve already imagined it. He comes up to me. I look up at him and I ask if he’ll tell me everything.”

  His father had seemed to have a hard time replying. “And does he?”

  Rhusta had confessed that, no, he hadn’t yet. But that the man, Merehr, asked him his name.

  “Well, that’s a good start,” his father had replied with some relief and had gone to set the book down. But Rhusta had stopped him. “Read just a little more, all right? At least the next verse.”

  His father had acquiesced and, to this day, Rhusta remembered the line he’d read: “ ‘He fled. Darker than night were the shapes and shadows that followed him. In cavernous trees, he slept. There was death in his dreams. Before him, the void. Behind him, ruin. I saw a green valley mirrored in his mind. And then, nothing. When day came, I looked out across a foreign land and found him again. Though the passing of time was hidden from me, I knew in my heart that this was the Leader of Legend the prophets before me had spoken of.’ ”

  Rhusta recalled how brightly the firelight from the room’s wood stove had burned, casting lines of gold and orange across the pages of the Ancient Writings, how a burning log had split and cracked, sending tiny glowing sparks across the metal grating.

  He’d been only a little over eight revolutions that night, and the next verse his father had read had been one of his favorites. It was a verse every Rieevan child knew by heart: “ ‘And it seemed a sun was born in the heart of a cold star. And in his hands I saw a book and knew it contained the words I now write. Merehr would be that sun; he would be the blood of a new generation. I do not know if the length of my life will show me this, but into my long night has come a new hope.”

  Rhusta closed his eyes. Against the pain of the memory, he remembered asking his father, “Do you believe it?” And he saw his father’s eyes looking over the edge of the book at him. He’d felt so bright, so hopeful then, he hadn’t understood his father’s hesitation to speak of the Leader of Legend, how it seemed to pain him.

  It had been with an intermingling of adoration and worry that his father had finally replied, “Perhaps you can teach your fa a thing or two about faith. Now, off to bed with both of us.”

  Rhusta blinked as the memory fled. Beside him a new fire burned. A small one in a small cabin very far away from the fire and home where he and his father had read the Ancient Writings together. Rhusta took in the tall, shivering, unconscious man lying on his floor. The moment was incredible and sad. It was impossible and still happening.

  Rhusta pushed himself to his feet and moved slowly into the dark at the other side of the cabin.

  But he got very little sleep the next couple nights as Wing, in starts of waking delirium, took to drowning in fits of coughing and rivers of mucus. Simultaneously fevered and chilled, Wing shook and trembled and Rhusta fought to keep fluids in him while constantly tending to the fire and sweeping Wing’s burning body with cold cloths. Wing would drink ravenously and then throw it right back up. After one such fit, Rhusta sat by his side, aching from kneeling on the floor, smoothing Wing’s sweat-soaked hair away from his face and grumbling admonishingly, “Don’t die on my watch. I won’t forgive you. Besides, what would I tell your father and mother, eh?” But then Rhusta scoffed at himself. “Who am I kidding? What would I tell the whole damn valley and every crazy Rieevan in it? They’d kill me. If, of course, they knew I were still around.” He wrung out the rag. “What happened, anyway? Other than the obvious — the same thing that happened to me?”

  Wing had fallen into a sullen sort of quivering, his breath ragged, layered now and then by coughing that would only partially rouse him before he’d fall back again, drawn into a heavy, disturbed sleep.

  Over the blazing fire, Rhusta bent, infusing a set of dried herbs he hoped would stave off the fever from setting into Wing’s chest. Clearly, the Rieevan was suffering from severe exposure. Rhusta had kept a close eye on his fingers and toes, relieved to find colour returning to them. He couldn’t imagine having to perform an amputation on Wing, experiencing his own set of chills at the thought.

  Returning to the pot hanging over the fire, he poured a cupful and, squatting at Wing’s side, took Wing’s head in his hand.

  “Hey, come around here, you need to drink this.”

  Wing’s head was heavy in his hand until he roused a little and took some of the weight himself. He glanced up at Rhusta with unfocused eyes as Rhusta pressed the cup to his lips. “And no vomiting it back up. Inside, boy. Inside.”

  Wing managed to down half the cup before breaking into an uncontrollable grimace.

  “It is gods-awful bitter,” Rhusta admitted, and then snapped his fingers. “Wait! I’ve got something for that.”

  With a grunt, Rhusta shoved himself to his feet and retrieved a leather flask. He dumped a healthy portion of the brew into the rest of the herbal concoction in the cup and helped Wing raise his head to drink again.

  Wing’s attitude shifted upon smelling the alcohol and he drank with a little more
enthusiasm. When Wing laid his head back once more, Rhusta noticed his face relax with the warmth of the liquor as it made its way into his belly.

  “Don’t be greedy,” Rhusta said. “My stock won’t be ready for another five turns.”

  But Wing didn’t respond, having already been pulled back into the dark of exhaustion and, Rhusta hoped, healing.

  Chapter 52

  Transformation

  W ing was awakened by a stream of bright sun rays lancing across his eyelids. He turned his head away from the light and opened his eyes slowly, squinting, trying to collect his thoughts. He vaguely remembered coming upon a cabin, but when — last night? Last night seemed too soon. His body felt heavy, as if he had been asleep for days.

  “You’d better get up and get some food ’fore it’s cold and I’m gone,” a voice said from across the room.

  Wing rose stiffly to his elbows and looked over to see a man busily placing bowls of food about a small table. Wing studied him for a moment. He remembered the gnarled hands, the slump of the shoulders, the long reddish hair, the odd steely-blue colour of his eyes. But when the old man looked up at him, Wing felt a sharp jolt of familiarity — not as if it were Wing who remembered the old man, but the old man who knew Wing.

  “Hurry up, I got work to do,” the old man said, quickly looking away. He was speaking in the Fultershier and though Wing could understand the individual words it was more difficult to understand their collective meaning.

  Wing glanced down at himself, noticing the shifts of cloth wrapped about his hands and feet. He looked them over and then back across the one-roomed cabin at the old man who was moving about in a hurry as if not noticing him at all.

  Wing shrugged — perhaps he was a bit delusional. After all, he had been on the brink of starvation for, well, he had no idea how long, sick, feverish...

  Getting stiffly to his feet, Wing made his way over to the table, taking in the cabin’s effects on his way. Hanging on the walls and lying over chairs were sparse compliments of animal skins and tools. Flanking either side of a small window were a set of roughly polished shelves filled with clay jars of foodstuffs, utensils, and cookware. And up against the back wall sat a bed with a small bookshelf at its feet.