Wing & Nien

by Shytei Corellian

  And then he heard Monteray’s voice again and this time it was not coming from the other side of the Mietan but from directly behind him. “Nien.”

  Surprised, briefly, Nien waited, trembling, on the precipice between the need to run and the compulsion to show Monteray the respect he deserved.

  “I have some small understanding of what happened to you,” Monteray said. “If you will give yourself a chance, you may find that what was once there, is still there.”

  Nien’s head sank. Slowly, he made himself turn around. “I appreciate the idea — the hope — but whenever I think about it, whenever I think of even holding a blade in my hand again, walls close in on me, I smell death, my…my chest….”

  Monteray nodded. “Come,” he said, and motioned for Nien to follow him. At the stairs to the dais, Monteray sat down. Nien sat down beside him, his breath unsteady, eyes fixed on the floor.

  “You are an interesting mix, Nien Cawutt. Your strength and courage cannot be doubted. But sensitivity?” Monteray nodded to himself. “That is what makes you great. That is what netaia Lant saw in you. To him, skill with a sword came a distant second to greatness of heart. That you feel as you do now would have been of no surprise to Lant, nor is it to me.” Monteray laid his hand on Nien’s knee. “You are much more than a warrior, Nien. But if you find the strength again, your brother and I would welcome your company in the Mietan, and if our plans succeed the three of you may only have to wield a sword once more in your lifetimes.”

  Nien felt as he had after the battle of Jayak when Lant had spoken with him, encouraged him, tried to lead him from the dark back to his strength. He appreciated the effort, but still, could not see it.

  “Thank you, Master Monteray. I just, I’m not ready. I can’t promise that I ever will be.”

  Monteray lowered his head respectfully.

  Nien stood, legs still trembling. Returning Monteray’s nod, he made his way across the Mietan and out through the large doors into the cool night air under the broad night sky. He gasped, feeling like a claustrophobic who’d just broken free of a very tight space.

  The walk back to the cabin helped to ease his racing heart but not his troubled mind.

  Inside, he found Wing lying on his bed, arm thrown over his eyes, Lucin lying in his usual spot at the side of the bed, licking his front leg lazily with a long pink tongue. He was growing rapidly, emerging from the clumsiness of a cub into what Nien was sure would soon be a shy’teh of man-eating capabilities.

  Walking across the room, Nien sat down on the edge of his bed to remove his boots.

  “Nien?” Wing asked, clearly awake though he left his arm over his eyes.

  “Uh huh,” Nien answered, he didn’t really feel like talking.

  “You all right?”

  Nien shook his head. How could Wing know something was wrong without even looking at him?

  “E’te. I was just out in the Mietan looking for you.”

  “I was up at the house with Carly. I think she prefers the company of the ladies over us.” Nien snorted. “Was Monteray there? Kate was looking for him.”

  “He was,” Nien said. And that was all.

  The moment of silence seemed to be the window Wing needed to say, “Did he ask you if you wanted to train with us?”

  Nien’s face was solemn. It was evident Wing and Monteray had been pondering asking him. “Must be a conspiracy.”

  Wing moved his arm away from his face. “What?”

  “Yes. He did.”

  “Oh.”

  The truth was, before the incident in the Mietan tonight, he had been considering it. Now, after having frozen in the path of Monteray’s blade, he was sure he was not ready.

  Just then, Carly came in. She cast a quick eye at Lucin before moving over to the small fire.

  Nien was grateful for the interruption in the conversation until Carly said to Wing, “I’d like to train a while with you and Monteray tomorrow afternoon. I feel strong enough now.”

  She’d already joined them on odd occasions in the past few turns but as she was still recovering from severe malnourishment, had been unable to train hard or very long.

  “Sure,” Wing said. His eyes floated not so surreptitiously to Nien.

  Carly noticed. “What?”

  “Nien?” Wing said.

  Nien stared back at him He’d just escaped the Mietan only to feel like he was being caged once more.

  “What?” Carly asked again.

  “Monteray and I were wondering if Nien wanted to train with us as well.”

  Carly nodded. “That’d be great,” she said brightly. “Just like old times.”

  Nien cast Carly a quick look he wished he could have prevented.

  “Oh,” Carly said, realizing her mistake. “It’s all right, never mind. I’ve just been playing around, anyway. Wing’s the one who’s really training.”

  “E’te, I’m enjoying myself taking a turn pounding on Carly,” Wing said.

  Carly looked at Nien and shook her head. Despite the mood he was in, Nien laughed.

  Wing looked between them. “I am! Especially when I used to have to hear about Nien doing so all the time.”

  “Well none of the other Cant members were brave enough to go at her as hard as she could take it.”

  Carly grinned wickedly at Wing. “So, you actually think you’re up to the task? Been practicing with the long blade or the short?”

  Wing’s face cracked. “Both,” he said.

  Nien groaned. “All right, stop it. I’ll train.”

  “All right?” Wing and Carly said at the same time.

  “E’te, just stop all the innuendo and I’ll join you.”

  Wing and Carly looked pleased but Nien felt no such enthusiasm. Ever since Wing had agreed to train with Monteray, Nien had felt like they’d been swept up in something none of them had actually chosen. It had just happened, and he wasn’t even sure why. Most confusing of all was that Wing had agreed to train. He’d refused to join the Cant in Rieeve. So why would he agree to learn the art now that Rieeve was lost? Why would he agree to fight with the other valleys — if it came to that?

  “Just,” Nien said, his voice solemn once more, “tell me why.” He looked at Wing.

  He could feel Carly watching them both, aware of the chill that had suddenly entered the room.

  After a lingering moment, Wing said, “We agreed to stick around long enough to help Monteray with the Plan, to offer our voices and our stories as proof of what the other valleys are facing. I hope we don’t have to fight. I still don’t want to, but this time, if we do, I want to be ready.”

  Softly, Carly said. “So, you think we might get Rieeve back?”

  Nien felt sick in his heart hearing the question. Like Wing, he didn’t want to go back to Rieeve, even if it was liberated.

  Wing was quiet. When he spoke again Nien wished he wouldn’t have. “I don’t know. I guess it’s possible with the other valleys. But even with their help, why would we want to regain something Eosha didn’t care enough to save in the first place?”

  Nien and Carly simply looked at him.

  “You asked,” Wing said.

  Chapter 71

  Darkness Ascends

  “W ing.”

  Wing turned and looked at Carly across the expanse of the Mietan. He’d been pacing and his hair and body were drenched in sweat. He appeared tall and dark, but it was his face that startled her. Grey and fierce it was, thin and rigid.

  What happened? Carly wondered.

  After the conversation she, Wing, and Nien had had in the cabin a change had come over Wing. He’d spent the past day or so alone, not even coming up to the house for meals. It was late now and she’d come out to look for him.

  “Wing?” she asked carefully.

  “Now is not a good time,” Wing said, his voice distant, haunted.

  The moon shone eerily through the dome of stained glass high above, filling the Mietan with a strange half-light through which Wing rang
ed, daunting and grey. Bare-chested, the light gleamed across the long, jagged scars that covered his chest and shoulders.

  “Wing, please...”

  But it seemed he had already forgotten she was there as he returned to pacing, his body flashing against the imperial walls of the Mietan like silvered etching. For the first time, Carly noticed that he held a long sword in his hand.

  “What’s wrong? Are you hurt?” He was not only acting but moving strangely.

  Wing’s eyes lit upon her. “Go away,” he said evenly. His gaze was hard, like pressed metal.

  Carly shrank back.

  What was going on? she thought.

  And then, as if in direct answer to her question, she became aware of feeling terrible and dark. It cut her off from herself, separated her mind from her body, the space she occupied from the place in which she stood. She might have swum there for a moment or a revolution before a physical jolt reconnected her senses —

  She’d been unconsciously backing away and had bumped up against the Mietan doors.

  Her eyes shot across the room. At the far side, Wing appeared then disappeared like a deathly sable ghost, the centrical force of a whirling black vortice. Emanating black light, he shone in reverse, filling the Mietan with a glistening sheen of night.

  Whether Wing was enchanted or she herself bewitched, Carly could not tell, but as Wing materialized once more, rather than the apparition, Carly saw instead a tall man walking patiently behind the curved arms of a plow, the crumbly, wet soil churning up at his booted feet, the evening sun causing his hair to shine like coruscating threads of ebony. Though all features of his face were lost to her, Carly heard the heavy beat of his heart in the great openness, felt its throb within the pale pulses of moon and starlight, and she understood: It had not been something she’d been feeling but what Wing was feeling that had just caused her to lose her grip.

  The realization cleared her mind and set her resolve. Beneath the scars, beneath the towering wall of dark energy, was that man of the fields and he was neither shadow nor blade —

  And I will not abandon him to either.

  Fixing Wing with her eyes, she walked back toward the center of the Mietan. Her voice was calm but firm as she said: “Don’t drop the reins, Wing. Talk to me.”

  Wing leaned the sword against a wall. Pulling his hair away from his face, he tied it in a knot at the back of his neck and returned to pacing the wide-open floor. Like a cornered shy’teh, he passed from moonlight into shadow and back again, the immensity of his grief scratching at the four walls of the Mietan.

  Carly waited, hoping she had reached him.

  When at last Wing spoke, his voice was throaty, ill constrained and barely recognizable — more the glistening black ghost than the man she knew.

  “There is no going back. There is no going back to seed and field and family. There is no going back to mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, friends. There is only a broken and burned Village and one ancient castle where the slayers of our people sleep on a floor still stained with their blood.”

  Wrapped in a dark vision inside his own mind, Carly continued to wait, giving him the time to find his way through it.

  “But if we do go back,” Wing began again, “if we drive them out, we will not be burning Ka’ull homes. We will not be enslaving them or murdering them outright. There can be no justice. There is no replacing all they took.

  “So, what now? If Legran and Quieness and Jayak say they’ll fight to drive the Ka’ull out, what then? I can’t see Rieeve reborn. All I see are the dead and the barely living. Life is broken. I see long lines of people in chains. I see great pits. All is blood’s fire. It’s all wrong. There is no happiness, no resolution, only more death for that which is irreplaceable.”

  He paused, whether searching for the words or the will to speak them, Carly could not tell.

  “I am wrung,” he said. “There is only the land that remains, and” ⎯ his throat constricted ⎯ “I don’t care. I never want to till another row nor plant another crop. It all feels more lonely than ever.”

  His words seared Carly’s heart. Wing was the soil, the breath, the life in the dirt, of Rieeve itself. She’d always known it, but she’d never seen it so clearly.

  “But the Ka’ull,” Wing said, forcing himself to continue, “they should die for what they did, shouldn’t they? Shouldn’t I want the satisfaction of seeing terror in a Ka’ull’s eyes before I bury a sword in his chest?”

  Carly trembled. Wing stood so tall, so magnificent — so terrifying. When he spoke again, Carly thought it might be for the last time.

  “What is wrong with me that I don’t?”

  And then, from out of the floor beneath Wing’s feet, Carly noticed a grey smoke begin to rise. In a state of wonder and revulsion, Carly watched it crawl and wrap itself around Wing’s ankles like a living thing. Briefly, she wondered where it was coming from —

  In the next instant, she understood: Not of its own accord, but by Wing’s summon had it come. And not of its own substance was it made, but of Wing’s guilt and rage.

  In awe, Carly could do nothing but watch as the snaking smoke liquefied into a shining black wave. Steadily, it rose, gathering momentum as it twisted itself around Wing’s body, climbing about him as if he were the central tower of a spiral staircase. From its grounding place somewhere in the floor beneath them to its culminating point high above, the black wave shimmered and spun, growing up and out, holding Wing as its center.

  Her heart pounding in the cavernous silence of her chest, Carly watched as the cyclonic column continued to spin, slowly swallowing Wing down its swirling black throat. But just as she thought Wing might vanish entirely the immense column slowed and paused. And then, ominously, it began to reverse directions.

  Carly started back as the wave reached the height of its velocity and came crashing down.

  It broke upon the Mietan floor in a starlit wash, flowing out in every direction, bathing her feet in a thick cascade of colour.

  Turning, Wing grabbed up the sword he’d leaned against the wall and threw it. It spun through the air, moonlight glinting off its silvered blade as it revolved end over end before hitting the floor with a resounding clang and sliding to a stop at the far side. Twisting away from it, Wing curled his hands into fists, compressing the dark energy in his palms till it burst from between his fingers in a deathly spray of two black stars.

  He howled.

  The sound was terrifying and unreal. Carly felt the power of it pull at her own throat. It made her want to cry out as well. Either to save him or to join him, she was unsure.

  Struggling, Wing managed a shallow, husky breath. “I don’t want to go back,” he muttered. Carly could barely hear him; she took a few steps closer. “I want to leave Rieeve” — he coughed, inhaled sharply — “withered, desolate, dry.” In the mystical note of night’s light through stained glass, Carly felt Wing’s eyes brush hers. “I have no right to ask, but there is you now,” he said. “There is Nien. Is that not enough? Can’t we just go away and forget it all?”

  Carly wanted to answer. She felt so a part of him at that moment that the voice inside her head cried: Yes! Of course, yes. Let’s just leave. Go away. Leave everything, just start over. Be new people. Different people. Any other people than who we are...

  “I —” she started to say, but in her brief silence, Wing had slipped away. He stood wavering like a great tree in a fierce wind before stumbling backward, tearing at his own chest with his hands as if attempting to rip open an invisible shirt.

  Carly tried to go to him, to stop him, but could not get her feet to move.

  Wing fell to his knees.

  Carly thought she heard a dry sob, but it was only a trick of the wind through the two large doors behind her for Wing was silent, still as carven stone.

  Carly tried again to move. This time her feet obeyed. At his side, she lowered herself to the floor.

  Heavy moments prevailed before Wing’s weary voi
ce bled into the darkness beside her: “Nien has said he’ll come here to the Mietan, train again, that which he fears most he’s said he’ll face with me.” He drew a breath that, to Carly, sounded like the scrape of a hoof file through his lungs. “The only reason he agreed is because he thinks it’s what I want. But I don’t, Carly. I don’t. I want to go away. Somewhere far away. Just you, and me, and Nien.”

  Carly’s head lowered. There was nothing else to say, nothing else to do. She found her voice and said, “I am with you. Wherever you go, I am with you.”

  Wing’s head was down over the floor. He nodded.

  In the deep, languishing silence Carly remained at his side. “Come back to the cabin,” she said softly.

  Wing shook his head.

  “Come back with me,” she said.

  He remained silent and sunk a little, as if the floor beneath him had begun to give way.

  “I’ll come back soon,” he said.

  Stroking his cheek with her palm, Carly pushed his hair away from his face and kissed him at the corner of his mouth. She then got to her feet and crossing the long, smooth floor, stepped out through the Mietan doors into the night.

  Beneath the stained-glass dome of the Mietan, legs bent beneath him, body curled over, head upon his knees, Wing remained — a sculpted figure in a living painting.

  Moonlight through the coloured glass of the Mietan’s apex fell upon his naked shoulders. The light ran off his back in a glistening purple flood, illuminating a dark circle around him against the glossy inlay of the wooden floor.

  Inside, Wing was burning. Thoughts hammered him, kindling a fiery ache deep in his gut. His quickening inhalations fanned the flame. Scorching its way through him, Wing felt the ropy scars from the claws of the shy’teh begin to burn in hot streaks across his chest and back as if the big cat were there again, tearing at his flesh.

  The pain made him tremble. A strange half-cry escaped him. The cry was unintelligible, but that hardly mattered.

  His jaw clenched.

  Why bare time before me and then close the door? he begged the silence. What did I do? What more could I have done? Why punish them for my weakness? He choked. My people. This, the price of devotion.