Chapter Twenty-Seven
Darkness hovered on the edge of my consciousness. A rich, velvety black that offered somewhere to hide, but also threatened to swallow me whole.
My eyes were open, but I had retreated into myself, terrified that any movement, even the flicker of an eye, would open the soaring pain in my abdomen. I could hear Oriel screaming into the empty corridor for a healer over my fluttery, shallow breaths, and an older, quieter voice telling him not to panic. I could feel him scooping me up and cradling me to his chest, the breeze riffling my hair as he ran faster than any human should be able to, his strides measured so as not to jostle me.
And I could feel the pain in my side that burned like a thousand fires. Fires filled with needles and soaked in acid. I held myself as still as I could in Oriel’s arms. A terrible itching ache underneath the pain made me want to cough, but something about the fire in my chest told me that would be a bad, and bloody, idea.
Oriel murmured softly as he ran, telling me, despite all evidence to the contrary, that everything was going to be okay, that I was going to be fine.
We were indoors again; the antiseptic-scented warmth tickled my face as Oriel spoke tensely to someone, still moving swiftly.
I felt myself being gently laid on a cold table, but even this slight movement felt like someone stamping on me. I concentrated on pulling air into my lungs in short, painful bursts while people gathered round, their voices wavering in and out, like a radio tuning.
‘This is a sterile operating room. You need to leave.’
‘I’m not going anywhere.’
A hiss of annoyance. ‘Then at least stay out of my way. Stannis, come and give me a hand; this blade needs to come out. On three. One...two...three.’
The fires burned hotter and brighter, my charring flesh was being squeezed by an iron vice. My already-shallow breaths sped up; there was no way to get enough oxygen into my lungs. One of the voices swore. ‘Lung’s gone.’ I started to panic, trying to move, but strong hands held me down and a sickly-sweet cloth was placed over my mouth and nose.
The darkness reached up to grab me, and I let it.
Some immeasurable amount of time later, the darkness receded and an overwhelming pressure my chest replaced it. Breathing was marginally easier now, slow and shallow. I felt my hand being squeezed.
I cracked my eyes open. Too bright. The light was too bright to open my eyes.
A voice that reminded me of sunshine murmured softly but I was too tired to make out the words and I sank down again.
When I surfaced again later, the pressure on my chest was still weighing me down but it seemed like opening my eyes might be easier. I squinted at the light and tried to turn my head away from it.
‘Hang on, let me get the lamps.’ The lights faded and I opened my eyes fully. I was propped up with pillows against a wooden frame on a bed. Even semi-comatose I could tell that the frame was there to prevent the vast amounts of padding around my chest from getting jostled. My arms lay by my sides, my right one bound in thick plaster.
On a chair next to me sat Oriel, watching me with purple-smudged eyes. He was about ten shades paler than I remembered and the dark stubble along his jaw and general unkempt air was at odds with the pristine whitewashed room.
‘Hey,’ he said. He was holding my hand and stroking my knuckles with the pad of his thumb.
My eyes still felt heavy and my head swam with the effort to keep them open. ‘Hey.’ My voice was crackly with disuse.
‘How are you feeling?’
I frowned, trying to gather my thoughts, which were wisping about my head like bits of cloud. ‘Like I got stabbed,’ I whispered faintly. I ran my parched tongue over my lips. ‘And I’m really thirsty.’
‘Here,’ Oriel held a tumbler of water to my lips and I gulped it greedily. ‘Don’t drink so quickly; it’ll come back up again.’ I tried to slow down, but every sip seemed to evaporate in my mouth like cold water on a hot pavement.
Now that my thoughts were starting to come together, I could take stock of where I was. I looked around the room over the rim of my cup. Everywhere that could either be painted or covered in white, was. ‘Hospital?’ I asked.
He nodded. ‘Infirmary. Your lung collapsed, so the healers treated that, but then they realised your wrist was broken and had started to heal crooked, so they had to re-break it and set it again.’ He took the cup away to let me speak. ‘What happened? How did she overpower you?’
I winced at how easily Molly had managed to get the better of me. ‘She tricked me,’ I admitted.
‘And then she broke your wrist?’
‘What? Oh, no. That wasn’t Molly, it was Baeroth.’
‘Baeroth?’
‘He stamped on it.’
If possible, Oriel went even paler than before. He ran his hand over his face. ‘Why didn’t you tell me? How did I not know about this?’
I racked my brains. Why hadn’t I said anything? It’s not like I was some big, stoic hero-type. It just seemed like there had been too much else to do at the time. ‘How long have I been out for?’
‘Two days. They’ve kept you knocked out to give you a chance to heal,’ he said quietly.
After I’d finished drinking, Oriel sat back down and took my hand again. ‘I’m so sorry, Ro,’ he whispered.
‘It wasn’t your fault.’
‘It was. I shouldn’t have left you with her.
‘It’s not. It was Molly.’ Shit. Molly. ‘Did you...?’
Seeing the question in my eyes, Oriel shook his head. ‘She got away. You were losing blood.’ He swallowed. ‘I had to get help.’
I tugged weakly at his hand, trying to pull him closer and he kicked his boots off and climbed up on the bed with me. He lay alongside me, propped up on one elbow, keeping clear of the thick bandages swaddling my torso and started gently stroking the hair away from my forehead. Up close, I could see better how much of a toll the last couple of days had taken on him. ‘You look like shit,’ I croaked.
He laughed softly. ‘You must be feeling better if you’ve got the energy to insult me,’ he said. He kissed the top of my head, his stubble catching in my hair.
The pain in my chest stopped me lifting my arms to hug him, so I contented myself with snuggling my head into the crook of his arm. He rested his cheek on the top of my head.
I nodded, feeling my eyes droop. Damn, the drugs they’d knocked me out with were go-o-o-od. ‘So what now?’
He picked up a lock of my hair and started twirling it around his finger. ‘Now you go back to sleep, it’ll help you heal quicker.’
‘Will you stay with me?’ I asked in my most pathetic voice.
I felt him smile. ‘Always.’
The next day I was feeling miles better. My mind was a lot less furry. My stomach still felt tight and itchy, but I could sit up, raise my arms and laugh without it feeling like my insides were going to plop open.
Oriel kept me company until I found out that he’d - yuck - not had a bath in the three days since I was attacked so when my healer, an older man with sandy hair pulled back into a ponytail, arrived, I sent him away to rectify the situation. He hesitated by the door. ‘When I get back we should probably talk.’ I nodded. What with rescuing Owen and opening portals and getting stabbed, I’d still not had a chance to fill him in about the memories I’d unearthed in Thornsvale. I needed to hear his side, too. I wanted him to fill in the gaps I knew were missing.
The healer ushered Oriel out of the room while I pulled my hospital pyjamas up, then he gently lifted my bandages and padding and inspected my wound, making soft noises of approval.
‘Yes, that’s coming along rather well,’ he murmured. ‘Why don’t you take a look?’ I’d had my face turned away and my eyes scrunched up while he checked me over, but I cracked one eye open and peered into the mirror he held at my side. All that was left to show I’d been skewered like a shish kebab was an angry red line of scar tissue.
‘Wow. I can’t
believe how quickly it’s healed. Thank you so much.’
He shrugged modestly, scribbling hurriedly on a clipboard at the end of my bed. ‘I must admit I’m very pleased with it. I do love Blessed patients; your accelerated healing makes me look good.’ He capped his pen and slid it back into his pocket. ‘You’ll still need to take it easy, the outer part of the wound is sound, but the interior is still healing. I’ll discharge you tomorrow morning - do you have somewhere to stay?’ I had absolutely no idea where I’d be staying, but I nodded anyway. I was sure Neve would let me crash in with her if it came to it.
Just then, Oriel came through the door carrying a cloth-covered tray. He’d shaved and changed his clothes and his damp hair was combed back. He set the tray down in the middle of the bed before hopping up and settling cross-legged opposite me. ‘So what’s the prognosis?’ he asked, whipping the cloth off the tray to reveal a huge array of bread, sliced meat and cakes. ‘Are you going to live?’
Gingerly I reached over to take some food. My stomach felt like it was trying to crawl out of my throat. ‘He’s going to discharge me tomorrow morning.’
‘Good, good. I saw Neve back at the barracks. She asked after you; she wants to know when she can come and visit. I told her you were still resting.’ He cocked a questioning eyebrow at me. ‘Is that okay?’
I nodded, taking a bite of cake. I wanted to see Neve, but just…when I had a bit more energy.
Oriel started making sandwiches for us and I finished off the cake, leaving my hands twisting awkwardly in my lap. ‘We need to talk.’ I blurted out.
He stopped what he was doing and put the tray on my bedside table. He looked at me, waiting.
‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ I asked, trying hard to keep the emotion out of my voice. ‘The very first night I was here, I asked you where I knew you from.’ Don’t get angry. Don’t cry. ‘You should have told me.’
He raised his finger to interrupt. ‘Technically you didn’t. You asked if I was famous. And I answered you truthfully.’ He caught my stony expression and lowered the finger. ‘Although I admit I may have deliberately misunderstood your meaning.’
‘You should have told me. Jesus, Oriel, it’s not like you’ve been shy about dropping bombshells on me, of asking me to believe three impossible things before breakfast each day.’ I mashed my lips together in an attempt to regain my composure and carried on more quietly. ‘These are my memories we’re talking about. I already have massive gaps in my waking memories, where I’ve squashed down things I didn’t want to remember. Now I find out I’m missing whole chunks of my dreams as well.’
Guilt rippled across his face and he looked down at the blanket. ‘You’re right, I could have told you. But honestly, Roanne, what could I have said? “Hey, I know you don’t know me, but we dream about each other nearly every night and we’ve been friends for as long as I can remember, only every morning you wake up and you don’t remember any of it and every night I have to try and convince you that I’m not some creepy stalker.” Would that have worked? Is that what I should have told you?’
I rearranged myself on my pillows and tried to look as haughty as I could, despite my crazy bed-hair. ‘Actually, yes it would have worked and yes, you should have told me,’ I said crisply.
He scooted up the bed to sit next to me, taking my fingertips in his own, slowly, like he thought I might push him onto the floor. ‘I told you before when we were at Rivermead: it wasn’t supposed to go like this. We were supposed to rescue Owen and come back to the Citadel for your training and your memories of...of us would have come back gradually along with the memories of your Blessings.’
‘But you told me about my Blessings.’
He sighed. ‘That’s because you’d already seen them in action. But with this... I had no evidence to show you, nothing to back up my claims. At best you’d have nodded along politely; worst-case you’d have run away screaming.’ He squeezed my hand and looked up at me. ‘When you first got here, I used to see you watching me, looking and wondering, and believe me, I wanted to tell you, but I couldn’t. Because this was too important to screw up.’
I fought the blush rising in my cheeks, because oh god, oh god, oh god, he’d seen me looking at him. I kept my eyes fixed on the bed, smoothing out wrinkles in the white sheet over my legs. ‘I only snippets, really. Just a few conversations here and there.’ I remembered the final dream, of Oriel hovering over me, our faces just centimetres apart, and started to blush. Again. ‘I asked you why we dream about each other and you said you didn’t know.’
He rolled his eyes. ‘You ask that like every. Single. Night.’
‘I called you a yoghurt-weaver.’
‘Yeah, that too. Every single night. And you’re all pleased because you think you’ve been really witty, and I’m like, Congratulations, you’ve now made the same joke two hundred and thirty-seven times.’ I dug him in the ribs with my elbow and he curled up, laughing. ‘But it’s true; I don’t know why it happens. The best guess I have is that the gods wanted you to come here, so they needed an agent to help set it up. We were probably conceived around the same date.’ He gave a full-body shrug. ‘Maybe that’s got something to do with it? Gods love shit like that.’
I looked at him in surprise. ‘But I thought you were seventeen?’
‘I am. Neve and I were born early. Twins often are.’
‘I’m a twin. I wasn’t born early.’ He raised an eyebrow at me. Oh yeah. Not really a twin. ‘So when was your birthday?’ My birthday wasn’t until the middle of August, so his had to have been recent.
‘Midsummer. The day you got here.’
‘No way! Wow. Bit of a rat’s arse of a birthday that turned out to be.’
‘Hardly,’ he laughed, ‘I got to meet you, didn’t I?’
I smiled. Correct answer. ‘So we were conceived on the same day. Mystical.’
‘Mystical,’ he agreed.
‘And slightly grim. Because obviously now I’m stuck with the thought of my parents and yours doing it at the same time.’ I made a face that was totally inadequate in summing up my feelings.
‘Thank you. Now I’m stuck with that image too.’
‘Sorry.’ I paused for a moment. ‘Oriel?’ My stomach was fluttering with nerves. Did I really want to know the answer to this? Yes. Yes, I did. Oriel turned to look at me, making my awkwardness spiral out of control. Actually, now I came to think of it, not knowing wouldn’t be too bad.
In the end I reasoned that, having managed to survive demons, two encounters with Baeroth and a stab in the guts, I would probably also survive this. ‘You said just now that we’re friends. Did we ever-’ Aargh! Just ask him. ‘Have we ever been, um, more than friends?’
Oriel looked confused for a second and then his eyes widened as he understood what I was trying to say. ‘Oh! Do you mean-’
‘Mmm.’
I stared at the ceiling waiting for his answer; unsure what I wanted it to be. It seemed an age before he finally spoke. ‘Ro, you’re my friend. My best friend. And I know I’m not yours,’ he said hurriedly. ‘You hardly know me, but I’ve spent nearly every night of my life with you. And we’ve never been anything more than friends.’ I nodded, still not looking at him. I wasn’t sure whether my relief or regret was stronger. ‘Besides,’ I could hear the smile in his voice, ‘I think kissing someone who isn’t going to remember it the next day is only a small step up from duct tape and chloroform.’
I laughed quietly and squeezed his hand, using it to pull myself up onto my side. This close I could see the faint traces of freckles across his nose and the flecks of hazel in the green of his eyes. Concentrating hard, I could bring back the memories Baeroth had tried to steal and I remembered seeing him at six, at nine, twelve, last week. ‘I really hope I get my memories back soon.’
He squeezed back, his fingers still laced through mine. ‘I do, too.’
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