Malek had been happy and shocked to learn that Ashe was the chief’s own son; he had thought that Ashe had been a girl but the gown had covered all but part of the tattoo on his back. Ashe pulled up the sleeves and skirt to show the tattoos of the young men, unfinished but still there, since the tattoos would have continued for the two years he had been captive, his last given on his tenth year.
At first, the time had been idyllic; Malek was teaching an elegant and complicated style of fighting up in the mountains west of Ersenais and the children all contributed and grew and it was so like a family. Ashe was looking more like a boy as time passed and Malek had even seen to finishing the tattoos for the boy himself. However, over the years, Malek became more brooding and gloomy and Ashe noticed that sometimes, he would even catch Malek arguing… with himself.
even catch Malek arguing… with himself.
year-old boy and he was full of himself and his abilities and proud that he could call himself a master so he did not pursue his curiosity for Malek’s fits of odd behavior. One night he awoke to the smell of fire and blood by a scared Suleika girl he had known as Palys and before he could jump up, he saw a great bloody scimitar burst through her chest. The smells alone froze him with panic as he remembered a night so like this one claiming his parents so violently. Malek’s eyes were filled with an empty insanity as he swung at Ashe’s chest; he had missed but theirs was a two-bladed technique and the second caught in Ashe’s skull and darkness had swallowed him instantly.
When Ashe woke again, his head was pounding and his shaggy hair was matted into a thick stiff clump of dried gore at his skull. He was terribly thirsty and hungry and his head hurt so bad, a weight on his stomach holding him down. His eyes had trouble focusing but when they did he saw a girl he didn’t recognize with a gaping hole in her chest was the thing holding him down. His sense of smell was returning and he could smell the rot of flesh around him, the buzz of insects drawn to decaying flesh. He started to retch, unable to vomit much at all, but every heave slamming into the side of his head like an ax in his skull and he had passed out for a while longer from the excruciating pain of it. When he woke, he was barely able to shove the girl away and stumble to his feet. He saw the other fly-covered bodies on the floor but he didn’t recognize any of them. He stumbled to the wall where a mirror hung and did not recognize his own face, a terrifying one at that.
The boy he saw in the mirror was thin and weak, covered in dried blood and dirt. His eyes were wraith-like hollows, deep purple shadows and near-black bruising made him look like some kind of sickly raccoon Folk. Turning his head, he found the real horror; the matted mass of blood and pus at the back left side of his head. It was mostly a huge scab but it did not stink with infection so Ashe had been relieved at least that it was not going to lead to a slow death, but he could not be sure what the damage was or even how it happened. The only things coming to him right how were his own name and the sword-style ingrained in him. However, when he looked at the tattoos, the dead children around him and the man holding the scythes that had cut off his own head, clearly after killing them, none of it was helping him remember anything else.
Ashe knew how to cure his headache so he had gathered the herbs, thinking maybe the fog would pass but it did not. He took care of his headache, too afraid to touch the mass at his skull just yet, almost terrified that he would clear the clot and his brain would seep out into his hand. He went about burying the bodies and severed limbs that he thought they belonged to; each in separate graves and even marked them with makeshift headstones. He remembered to find food and knew that there would be water in the well, but still nothing came back to him. He had spent the next day cleaning up the blood and making the place look less like the mass grave it had been. He had soaked his body in a small pond and he had tensed to gently pull at the mass of gore scabbed on his head when the water began to loosen it. The blood and pus mostly gave way in hard, slimy chunks but a huge ragged clotting was still there and the pain that shot through when he tried to pull it shot warning stars behind his eyelids and it made him give up on poking at it anymore.
When he looked at it in a mirror again, he could see that the man with the scimitars must have done it; a wicked straight slice that had taken a small slice of cartilage from his ear and opened his skull. The bones were mending (although it would never fuse properly and there was always a sharp pain when he pushed the scar tissue against it), the tissue was knitting, but the scar would be gruesome. The hair still poked through the gore so Ashe had very carefully shaved the sides and back of his head, as close as he could, leaving the top alone. The razor was able to gently shear away more of the scab to the angry red puckered of skin underneath. For weeks, he existed in this idyllic quiet place as his scar healed and his face and body strengthened with time and care. He would practice with the man’s scythes most of the day as he healed, only he had torn them from the hooked sheathes and repurposed them as daggers. He was shaving the sides of his head close to bald glancing at the pink shiny scar there one day when he noticed a piece of paper hidden behind the mirror.
Ashe pulled out the slip of paper and saw a kind of calendar with names and birthdays written in the blocks and some x’ed out. He did not know what day it was today, or even know how to make a guess, but one day about a month ahead of the ‘x’s, Ashe saw it said “Ashe’s 13th birthday”. Ashe frowned deeply, wondering how things here seemed to go so horribly wrong. He knew that he was tired of being alone with a brain that had no answers, so he gathered up some things and his makeshift daggers tied with stained scarves and set off down the mountain. After days of travel, he ended up in a town southeast of Ersenais called Guileford where a boy named Shyren told him the date.
“I turned 13 yesterday,” Ashe said absently. He still hadn’t managed to smile yet.
Shyren had clapped him on the back and told his father and Ashe had had his first alcoholic drink that night as a belated birthday present. He had also had the first woman he could remember but it still made him wince that he couldn’t remember her name. He didn’t have any more blades stuck in his head to use as an excuse for that.
Rienna had listened and her face had changed with so many emotions but she had not spoken a word. At the end of it, Ashe couldn’t tell what she was thinking—her face had gone blank as she took it all in, but she still held his hand and Melchior’s.
“Ashe… I know that you have a hard time thinking of yourself as lucky throughout the horrors you’ve been piecing together… but you have courage, wits, and strength, you found a teacher that saved you then failed at killing you, you found a brother that you thought was a monster then found out you were wrong about that too. Do you really need luck, when you have— “
“When I have something better. I realized that too. And you’re being humble; you forgot to mention yourself. If I had never met a certain pushy, mouthy woman, I doubt I would have made it this far either,” Ashe asserted, lightly caressing Rienna’s fingers with his thumb before letting go of her hand and standing up to put the chair back. “Dinsch took Krose to the main hall and we were going to share stories if you’re up for it. We weren’t the only ones to play hooky when Melchior got grumpy.”
Rienna smiled, her eyes filled with unshed tears. She sniffed and wiped them away, nodding.
“Give me a moment. I think I need to forgive Melchior while he’s sleeping so he doesn’t ruin it by being awake,” Rienna admitted, a crooked smile of amusement lighting up her face. She placed her hands over Melchior’s mechanical one where it lay on his stomach and tilted her head to study him.
Ashe laughed and headed out.
Chapter 11: Truth and Consequences
Verity and Finn weren’t quite sure how long they had been away; dying kind of had a way of stripping away your perception of time. After Verity and Finn had enjoyed a crushing embrace, they had spent some time looking over their limbs, checking their bodies for wounds. Both had clearly remembered the concrete splat of the water on impact
. Verity had Finn stretch out his wings, remembering one being torn off and the other flopping limp and useless when the air currents had torn them away from him when he was using them to shield Verity. She had remembered the wind stripping away their skin, flesh sheared away to the bone and it made her shiver involuntarily. She had been so broken that she had been in shock, she realized. Her body so pulverized that her nerve endings had given up on the overload. She had no muscles that would move and it had been her only thought: “move… move… move…” They had inspected their skin and it was completely healed and mended; no pinkish scars from healing, but the old silvery white scars of times past remained, anchoring them to the reality that they were still in their own bodies that had been so much meat before Yggdrassl had reached her ivory arms into the salty sea to reassemble them in sickening snaps of mending flesh and bone.
Once they had done away with their disbelief, Verity had wordlessly linked her arm with Finn’s and headed up the steep shores into the Uzhuak Forest so they could return to Mythec from the east gate.
Their silence was thick and their thoughts ran in so many directions as they tried to make some sense of the events. Both of them felt queasy as they remembered flashes of their grotesquely broken bodies clicking and bending into place. Even if the Mother hadn’t numbed their pain, the bits of memories made them cringe and it took everything not to rub at wounds that were now healed, the evidence of them long gone. Verity wanted to see Finn’s face again and, though he had looked as deep in thought as she, he had sensed her gaze and met it, smiling softly.
“Thank you for believing me,” Verity finally told Finn and he looked at her, startled that she could think otherwise. She shook her head though. “I overreacted though. We should have stayed overnight, until the winds had calmed, but I panicked. We would be dead if not for the Tree…”
“Verity, I could tell you were uncomfortable from the beginning and I was selfish to stay. You had every right to be terrified, every right to want to be gone immediately. I should have left right away, the moment I first saw your doubts, but…” Finn started, drifting off in his thoughts. He shook his head, ashamed that he had even been about to make an excuse.
“But they knew your father and you needed to know. Did you find out what you needed?” Verity told him, rubbing his arm in a gesture of comfort as the dryads led them towards the exit.
Finn did not answer right away and his face was impassive. “I… am not a stranger to orgies, Verity, and I know that you are aware of that, but what they were doing, what my father had gotten into… it’s not natural. Intimacy on any level is not about holding people prisoner, at least not unwillingly. That’s depravity and shows a lack of confidence. I know that it attracted my father because he had no control where my mother was concerned. He was passive with her and he needed to find a place to dominate. I couldn’t connect it to him, blind hero worship it was, but I felt so naïve, so separated from seeing what was happening.
“They never elaborated on the word ‘doll’ and they never told me it was about sex or secrets. They said they had built a place where a strict set of rules benefitted everyone who lived there and once we had gone to the party, I was feeling the same unease that you were. I think some of those women were even drugged. I was beginning to see what you had hinted at; the human women, the Reishefolk men, no children, no human men, no Reishefolk women and a lot of things that didn’t make sense. When I saw the terror in your eyes, I knew that you had pieced something together and I couldn’t bear to see you suffer. But, Verity, even if you had just really wanted to go without so strong a reason, I would have done so. I do not trap women in my intentions and you will always have the power to decide with me. Tell me what you saw, I can tell it still troubles you…”
Verity’s vision had blurred a bit as they stepped outside of Uzhuak on the main road, past a narrow passage that Verity had been sure was covered in thick wicked vines before, a place with two odd statues of a Felis and its ancestral animal.
“They knew some of the human girls wanted to leave, that some of them didn’t like being used too much. I heard them talk about ‘broken dolls’… women that had… ‘accidentally’ been dropped when taken out flying or that flung themselves onto the shoals. Human women did not leave that place but the men could come and go as they pleased. I shudder to think of what happened to ones with child, if they were allowed to live at all or if something was done to the children after birth, all number of terrifying thoughts in my head. I could hardly contain my terror when I found you, when I saw them… together and saw how… joyless their orgies were. I am not a wholly pure woman to pleasures of the flesh myself, but what I saw was not about pleasure so much as about power. I may have been a lucky woman in that respect, as my husband never ever used it in such a way. I cannot conceive of any joy coming from a place with no children…”
Finn finally found the courage to ask and he was not about to let it go. “Verity… you haven’t said much about your family and… I know it hurts you still, but I want to know about them,” Finn told her, watching her face closely. Her eyes wouldn’t meet his at first but when they did, she smiled and patted his hand again.
“You have earned my trust certainly, Finn… I will tell you,” Verity told him, seeing the pain fill her eyes but knowing she wanted to tell him as well.
Verity was barely a teenager when the old shaman had passed away. Her heart had been crushed when she had learned; she spent more time apprenticing with the old shaman than she did with her own family and the shaman had been like a grandmother to Verity. Everyone had believed that Mirage would belong to Verity but as time passed, none had been able to claim the power and the elders had seen it as a bad omen. Verity was too young and too stubborn to believe in omens.
As a girl, Verity was the type to shine in her parents’ eyes and she rarely ever strayed from what was good. She pretended to brush it off when the Mirage had not chosen her, but she found some secret pleasure in not seeing it going to anyone else. It may not have been the thing a good girl should think, but Verity did not hold herself to perfection and was fine with not being that way. Verity was good enough as she was and had no desire to chastise herself. She was a beautiful girl but she had shunned the attention of boys, valuing the future her parents had set for her.
The tribe had always betrothed young boys and girls, usually from birth if possible, so Verity had her husband chosen for her from day one. The boy, Callum, was four already when she was born and they would marry when she arrived at the age of 15. Unless she was to become shaman after all, in which case, she would not marry or lay with a man—the tribe was superstitious and believed the impurity of a woman would strip her of the gift. Verity was sure that men had come up with that superstition. Luckily for Callum, Verity was not chosen by Mirage and he made her a happy bride on her wedding night and every night and day he lived after.
Callum made Verity immensely happy but gave her a sense of security as well; he was a wonderful lover and a perfect gentleman and he always found small ways throughout every day to remind her she was precious. She simply could not imagine that life could get any better; at least, until she learned that his child grew in her belly and she knew an even greater joy.
Their first child came less than a year after their marriage, a spunky little girl with a full head of shiny black hair they had named Kalila, or Lila for short (pronounced LEE-lah, not LIElah, since ‘truth and lies’ wasn’t quite the comparison they wanted). Every day as her lively daughter grew, she would brush out that silky hair (that was curly like her father’s) and part each side, braiding each into a pigtail before her impatient daughter would run from their tents to play with the neighbor’s new puppies. Verity would delight in the way her toddler ran, those quick wobbly steps causing laughter to rise in her.
Just after her lovely Lila’s fourth birthday, Verity was thrilled to give Callum his son, a quiet sweet boy they called Candor. He was a calm infant and from the moment he was old enough to crawl
, he would watch Lila’s hair being braided patiently and he would follow after her dutifully when it was time to play with the dogs. Verity’s heart would soar and the joy would fill her to her eyes, forcing tears from them to make room for it— at least, that was what it felt like. Her children filled her with such pride and love that she always felt as if she were brimming since she wept at every little joy and hurt and was beyond contentment, filled with praise for her fortunate life.
Her husband never ceased his adoration and would bring her a humble bouquet of desert flowers every day. It always amazed her, for desert flowers were rare things indeed, but he always managed to find at least one to bring home to his pretty wife. Every day, she would take one from the vase and press it into a book, her book of days in love. Over the years, she had filled so many books and every time a curious child would find one, she would pull them out with pride and tell them how their love grew every day and she would need a library someday to find enough room to hold it.
When Candor was two, he begged his mother to teach him how to braid and Verity did not expect even her patient little boy to stick with it very long, but after a week, he could braid just as beautifully as his mother. Verity would always part Lila’s hair but Candor would do one side while she did the other and she would keep her own hair brushed and ready, for after a while, Candor had wanted to braid her hair too. She would sit patiently and every little tug of her hair sent honey-warm shivers of contentment through her heart. It was an idyllic existence and where her days were filled with her sweet children, her early morning and nights she would spend with her adoring husband. Her brothers and parents were always close by when she needed adult company or help with anything.
Shortly after Candor’s fourth birthday, Verity had stayed up late waiting for Callum to come home. She had put away dinner some hours before and had not worried at first; sometimes the old miners needed some help finishing up and Callum was always be the first to volunteer; not because he wanted to avoid coming home but because his kindness extended to everyone. Lila and Candor had long been abed and Verity was trembling with unease and fear. Callum never ever came home so late. Verity had known the desert all of her life so she checked on her little ones and slipped across the street to ask her mother and father if they saw Callum but they hadn’t. She asked her mother to wait with her kids while she went to the caves he usually mined in to look for what kept him.
The Truth about Heroes: Complete Trilogy (Heroes Trilogy) Page 45