by Kate L. Mary
I stayed that way for most of the ride, clinging to consciousness as desperately as I was clinging to the horse as pain pulsed across my back with every move the animal made. Once or twice the darkness threatened to win, but each time I managed to hold on. How, I had no idea.
Someone must have spotted us from the distance, because before we had even reached the edge of the village people were rushing out to greet us. I was in too much pain to focus, but I did register it when Mira slid off the horse.
Around me people were talking, but focusing on their words was impossible. Some of the voices sounded familiar, including Asa’s. How Mira was going to explain his presence was a mystery I could not focus on. Not when I was so close to falling into an abyss of blackness.
“Indra.”
He was at my side, his hands on me, somehow helping me off the horse while avoiding the parts of my body that ached the most. Then he was helping me walk, and when the darkness finally closed in to claim me, I felt him lift me into his arms.
21
When I woke, I found myself on my stomach once again. Only now I was in a bed. Not the one I had shared with Bodhi, but the one that I had at one time shared with my sister.
Anja was asleep at my side, curled up in a ball on the very edge, but the rest of the bed was empty. I shifted, trying to find my mother, and immediately regretted it when pain pulsed through me.
“Shhh.” There was movement, followed by footsteps, and then she was at my side, brushing the hair off my forehead. “Do not move.”
“How long have I been asleep?”
“Many hours,” she said. “But not long enough.” Her hand left my forehead and a second later she had a vial in front of my lips, the same one the doctor in the city had given Mira. “Drink, and then go back to sleep.”
I did as I was told, knowing that it would help ease my discomfort, but also knowing that sleep would evade me until I had answers to my questions.
“What happened?” I asked.
“You do not remember?” My mother settled on the bed next to me, her hand once again on my head.
“I mean after I passed out. Asa was here. What happened to him?”
“The Fortis man who helped you,” my mother said, but it was not a question. “He brought you to our hut and helped me get you settled. He refused to leave until he knew you were okay. Adina came and checked your wounds. We undressed you and the Fortis man turned away, but he still refused to leave. The heeler washed your back and applied leaves, and then she left us, but still he stayed.”
“Is he gone now?” I asked.
“He left some time ago, after he was sure you were only sleeping and not dying.” My mother’s hand stopped moving, and when I looked up, I found her studying my face. “This man is in love with you.”
“He has been helping us,” I said, not wanting to acknowledge Asa’s feelings out loud to my mother but refusing to lie to her. “He is better than the others.”
“I can see that, but Indra, you are a married woman.”
“I was,” I whispered, and a tear escaped from the corner of my eye. “It was not like that for me. I loved Bodhi. I still love him. But inside the city, Asa looked out for me. That is it.”
Her hand started moving over my head once more, and it was soothing. Like I was a child again. “I am sorry about Bodhi.”
I closed my eyes, trying to hold the tears in. They spilled over anyway. It was impossible to wipe them away without putting myself in pain, so I let them flow from my eyes and down my cheeks.
“He promised that he would stay away from the city.”
“Sometimes we do things because we feel like we do not have a choice. Maybe this was one of those things for Bodhi.”
Her words reminded me of what Asa had said in the mudroom and I murmured, “Maybe he could not have lived with himself if he had done nothing.”
“Maybe,” she said.
She went silent, but her hand kept moving, kept running down my head the way it had hundreds of times in my life. When I was sick or sad, when I was hurt. When we lost my father. It was so comforting that I felt myself start to drift off, felt the darkness begin to pull me down and the pain start to recede.
“I know your pain, my daughter. I have been there.” My body jerked at the sound of my mother’s voice, but if she noticed she made no indication. Instead she continued talking. “I was not like you. I did not run from love. When your father asked for my heart, I gave it to him freely. We were young. So much younger than you and Bodhi, but we loved one another deeply. Just as you loved your husband.
“There was so much heartbreak for us, so much disappointment and loss, but we weathered it all together and we were happy. And then we got you, and then Anja, and it felt as if God was trying to make up for everything He had taken from us. My heart was full, as was my life, and I believed that nothing would ever change that.”
A drop of moisture landed on my cheek, but it took a moment in my drugged haze to realize it was a tear. My mother was crying. I wanted to open my eyes, to look up and see her face. My eyes refused to obey, and so they stayed closed while my mother ran her hand down my head over and over again.
“I never told you what really happened. It was too hard. Maybe it was wrong. Maybe I should have given you more credit, but you were young and I was afraid the truth would be too much for you. Afraid that it would fill your life with fear or rage.
“Your father was out hunting, that much you know, but he was not attacked by a forest cat. It was not an animal at all, but a man. Or a group of them. The Fortis hunters must have taken him by surprise because he was always careful. He always watched his back. When he failed to come home that night, I knew. I knew what had happened. It was not until the next afternoon that they found his body.”
She paused and let out a deep breath and I desperately tried to force my eyes to open, but they remained closed. “For a short time after that I was so sad and angry and broken that I wanted to die. I had you girls to take care of, and it pulled me out of the dark pit I found myself in. It was difficult, but necessary. I know you will have hard times my daughter, but you must do everything you can to find a purpose in this life. One that will keep you from falling into the pit of despair left in the wake of your husband’s death.”
She went on, her words becoming more and more fuzzy as the moments passed until they were nothing but murmurs on the wind. And then the blackness pulled me in, wrapping me in its comforting embrace.
I spent my days lying on my stomach. Adina kept watch over my wounds while my mother and sister took care of my other needs. Once we ran out of the medicine from Sovereign City, I found sleep nearly impossible. I woke screaming from dreams where I had to watch my husband get beheaded over and over again, where Lysander forced me down, right on top of Bodhi’s body. Where grizzards pecked at me while Fortis guards watched with glee in their eyes. It was a never-ending nightmare, but not nearly as tortuous as the reality I woke to. The one where Bodhi was gone for good.
When I was finally allowed to get up and move around a little, I found it nearly impossible. Between my lack of rest and my injuries, I had no energy. Just walking around the hut wore me out, but I was relieved to be out of bed. More than that, I wanted to get my stamina back up. Lying in the hut all day meant I had nothing to do but think, and since that moment I woke up in my hut to find Bodhi gone, he had been the only thing on my mind.
I thought about all the wasted years I had spent running from my feelings. All the time I could have been with him but had instead refused to allow myself to give in. Now, looking back on it all, I had no idea why I had done it. Why had I resisted something I had so obviously wanted? Why had I refused to allow Bodhi to love me when that was all he had ever wanted to do? I had no answers, which made it so much worse, and all I wanted was a distraction from the constant pain of knowing that I had lost so much.
My job in the city was out of the question. Going back was impossible. Even if I was allowed to return to my position, which I
was uncertain of, I would never again be able to look Saffron and Lysander in the eye. I also knew that I had to find a new way to provide for my family. The rations and medicine the Sovereign used to provide us with would be missed, and before long we would all suffer from the loss of it. My mother most of all. There had to be something I could do.
I thought about all those hours Bodhi and I had spent together in the woods and how I had felt after killing my first forest cat, and it felt like the answer I needed. The solution to what I would do without my job, as well as how to distract myself from thoughts of my dead husband.
Only, I was not ready to move on. Not yet. Even if my body had been healed enough to allow me to go out and hunt, my soul was not. I had to say my final goodbyes to Bodhi.
The Winta had very specific rituals for dealing with death. Things that ensured our departed would be welcomed into the afterlife following their passing. The bodies of our dead were supposed to be burned, but since the Sovereign had held onto Bodhi’s body, it was a ceremony we were unable to perform. I could only pray that he would still be able to rest in peace, because the idea of Bodhi not being admitted into the afterlife was more painful than the lashes I had received.
Even without the ceremony there were things that needed to be done. Things that I had been too injured to participate in before. Now that I was up and moving around, I was anxious to get them taken care of. Not just so I could move on, but so I could say my final goodbyes to my husband.
Everyone gathered for the ceremony, just as they had on the night that Bodhi and I were married. Old and young, men and women, they all congregated in the center of the village where the large fire was already burning. I sat on the ground at the front of the group, my back facing the fire and feeling its heat more than ever, while Bodhi’s family knelt at my side. My mother came to kneel in front of me, aided by my sister, who also held the bowl of dye while our mother wielded the tebori. She tapped it against my skin, under the lines that moved up my cheekbones. There she drew another half circle, looping it up so it captured the first one. The one that represented my father. She did this first on the right cheek, and then on the left, drawing blood from my skin and tears from my eyes that had nothing to do with the pain. When she was finished, she dipped her fingers in the bowl and rubbed the dye into the cuts just as Bodhi’s father had done on my wedding day, only these passage markings failed to make me feel complete the way those had. These marked me as a widow. As someone who had lost more than they should have at such a young age.
When she was finished, my mother took a clean cloth and washed my face. First the blood and dye from my skin, and then the tears from my eyes.
“Your husband will be with you always,” she said.
“May your travels to the afterlife be swift,” I whispered, reciting our traditional prayer for the dead to myself. Even though we had no body to burn, Bodhi still deserved a proper send off. “And may the transgressions you have committed on earth not prevent you from resting in peace eternal.”
Then I closed my eyes, focusing on the pain in my cheeks as I thought about Bodhi, and I told myself that her words were true. He was gone, but he would always be a part of me. Not just in the passage markings, but in my heart, in the village, and the people living here. In the forest we had spent so much time together in, in the caves, and the bow he had lovingly taught me to use. He had died, but Bodhi would always be with me because he had changed who I was. Both with his life, and with his death.
Mira brought news of the city back to me, but we never talked about me returning to my job. It was a subject we both knew would be pointless to discuss. After everything that had happened, I was unable to stomach the thought of walking through that gate ever again.
“Asa asks after you,” she said as I walked gingerly through the forest at her side.
“He still watches over you?” I asked her.
“More than ever.”
“He is a good man,” I said. “I never thought I would be able to say that about a Fortis, but it is true. Asa is a good man.”
“He is,” my friend agreed.
Every day after Mira returned from work, she walked with me into the woods, and each day I was able to go a little further. Three weeks had passed since Bodhi’s death, and I was healing and getting stronger, but still not sleeping any better, which was affecting my ability to do much. I needed rest, only the nights brought too much horror. They brought me dreams of the Fortis and the square where my life had changed, of grizzards tearing my husband apart while Saffron watched.
It had gotten so bad that if not for how much Asa had done for me, I doubted I would want to hear anyone talk about Sovereign City ever again. Still, every time Mira mentioned the man who had saved me, I felt something in my heart that made me believe I might actually be able to heal with time. It felt as if all the months of seeing how wonderful Asa could be had carved out a place for him, a place that remained uninjured—the only part of my heart that was still whole—and had instead given me faith in people. In the existence of goodness.
My feelings for Asa were different than the ones he had for me. I had no reason to believe they ever could be—if I ever saw him again, which I doubted—but he had done what he promised and protected me inside the walls, and for that he would always have a place in my heart.
If anything good came out of my injury, it was the extra time I was able to spend with my mother. She was growing weaker by the day, something that was magnified by the loss of the medicine I had been bringing her from the city. Just getting out of bed wore her out, and it seemed as if she had begun to wither away before my very eyes. I worried that she was in pain, only whenever I asked, she insisted that she was fine.
I tried to take on the majority of her care even though I was still healing. My sister’s eyes had lost some of their light with Bodhi’s death, and it had even affected her relationship with Jax. I knew that it had taken almost as much of a toll on her as it had on me. Bodhi’s death, my whipping, and now our mother’s rapidly declining health. My sister was young still, and even though I knew she was strong, I did not want her to have to be. Not when I could carry the load.
Nearly a month went by before Xandra visited me. I had not seen her since returning to the village, but it was something I had been thankful for. I remembered the part she had played in Bodhi’s death, and even though my husband had made his own choices, I was unable to think about Xandra without putting the majority of the blame on her shoulders. She must have known what would happen when she chose to lead him into the city, yet she had done it anyway. It was something I was unable to think about without a great amount of hate burning inside me.
I was in the middle of eating lunch when Xandra stopped by. My mother was with me, and since she was much too weak to excuse herself, she waved for me to go to the other side of the hut to talk. I obeyed even though I was certain that I had nothing to say to Xandra. At that moment, I was positive that I would not have been able to shed even a single tear if someone told me the woman had been ripped apart by grizzards inside the city.
Xandra was a good ten years older than me, but still unmarried, which was a rare occurrence in our village. The Winta believed that a woman needed a man to take care of her, and yet Xandra had chosen to remain in her mother’s hut. She was not an unattractive woman. In fact, she had what I considered to be striking features, with high cheekbones and full lips. Even more, she was tall and sturdy for an Outlier, with shoulders that were much broader than the average woman, and her light brown skin was both smooth and had a healthy glow to it. She kept her dark hair short, not shaved like Anja and my mother did, and it suited her features.
“I have been wanting to talk to you,” she began.
On the other side of the hut, my mother had turned so she was on her side, her back to us, but I knew she was listening.
“You should have talked to me earlier,” I said. “Before you led Bodhi into the city.”
Xandra’s brown eyes moved to
the ground. “I am sorry for my part, Indra. When he came to me that morning, I told him I would not take him there. I told him that he would die. That he would be leaving you alone. But he refused to let up. He followed me through the borderland, and when we got closer to the city, I knew that I had to make a choice. If I led him into the city through the tunnel he had a chance, but if I kept going and he followed me to the gate, there would be nothing I could do to save him. He would have died in the Fortis village, before he even made it inside. I did what I thought best, and even though I know it will not comfort you to hear it, I believe that it was the only thing I could have done.” She ventured a look up, keeping her head bowed. “I prayed that he would make it safely. I hope you can remember that when you look at me, and that one day you will be able to forgive me for the part I played in this.”
“You led my husband to his death.” My voice cracked and I knew that soon I would be crying, but I found it impossible to keep the tears in.
Bodhi was dead because of what Xandra had done. She had killed him, and now she was standing in front of me, asking me to forgive her. It was impossible. Just as I would never be able to look at Xandra without thinking about the sword cutting my husband’s head off, or the pain of the whip on my back.
She stayed where she was, but the sobs had clogged my throat too much to say anything else, so I turned my back on her.
Only a moment passed before the beat of her footsteps told me that she was leaving, and when the door shut behind her, I allowed my sobs to break free. Holding them back would have been impossible, anyway.
On the other side of the hut, my mother shifted and I turned to find her watching me.
“Your anger is misdirected, Indra.”
I swiped my hand across my face. “It is not. Xandra led Bodhi into the city even though she knew he would die. How can I forgive her for that? Could you?”
My mother pushed herself up with great effort, and even though I was still hurting and sad, I hurried to her side.