They walked through dinner that night, stopping only long enough to drink water and munch on leftover strips of rabbit meat from the day before.
Eli explained as they walked that the attackers were outlaws, splintered off from a larger group, which explained their presence up in the hills. “Running for their lives,” he said.
“Well, this is the place to do it,” Mara commented wryly.
As grateful as she was to put some extra distance between them and the outlaws, by the time they finally stopped for the night she was ready to weep. Her feet burned, her hands aching from the scramble up the hill followed by the scramble up the tree. Her entire body was a mass of knotted muscles held loosely together by watery muscles, and not stopping for dinner had taken a toll on her constitution. Eli’s apparent good health only made her feel worse. Despite the fight, the magical expenditure, the healed-but-only-after-considerable-bleeding wound, and the fact that he’d climbed just as many godforsaken hills as she had today, he didn’t appear to be suffering. Not even with the added weight of Nick, who had refused to be put down all evening, since the moment they’d clambered down out of the tree.
Mara felt silly. She felt superfluous. Useless. Which she ought to have been used to feeling, but that flash of a moment, when she’d seen the blood and thought Eli might actually need her, and not the other way around, had woken something up inside her–a driving need to be of use.
But she couldn’t help. She could barely walk. And, of course, Eli could tell.
“Sit,” he said, when she took Nick’s hand and declared she was going off to find firewood. “I’ll get it.”
“I can do it, Eli.”
“So can I.”
She sat, and though her body was happy about it, she made clear that she wasn’t. “Your martyr routine is aggravating, you know.”
“So is yours. Nicky, come help me with this.” Nick practically fell over himself toddling over to where Eli was unstrapping the canvas shelter from his pack. He had apparently inherited his mother’s desire to be useful. Lucky him, he hadn’t inherited her uselessness.
She watched, trying very hard to ignore the absolute bliss of taking the weight off her feet, as Nick and Eli erected the shelter between two trees. Well, Eli erected the shelter. Nick mostly stood and held a series of ropes and segments of canvas that didn’t appear very important, but which certainly felt important, judging by the straightness of his little spine, the pride on his face as he held them.
“Can I please do something to help?” she asked, once the shelter was erected and Eli made motions to go off in search of firewood and game.
He straightened, bow in hand. “Not tonight.” When she opened her mouth to protest, he sank down to a knee beside her, eyes warm. Apologetic. “Tomorrow’s a harder day,” he said, voice pitched low so Nick couldn’t hear. “And there’s leagues between us and Cinder, and two more weeks of rough travel after that to the Ribbon. You’re plenty strong enough to make it, but only if you listen to what your body is telling you. Right now, it’s telling you to rest, loudly enough even I can hear it.”
Her annoyance wilted like a bundle of herbs hung up to dry. He was right. Of course. Her body wasn’t just telling her to rest, it was screaming, pleading. The muscles of her calves threatened to cramp even as they spoke.
Eli rested the bow across his knees. “If you needed to, you could press on. I know that. You know that. You could and would survive this without me. But just because you could doesn’t mean you have to.”
Her eyes burned. Exhaustion, she told herself. Humiliation. Shame. Better those things than the truth–relief. Gratitude. Warmth that scalded the bloodless, frigid remnants of her soul.
She nodded, lowering her face to hide her tears. He stood, shifting darkness in her periphery. “I’ll be back soon, and I’ll stay within earshot. Call if you need me.”
She didn’t call, and he returned thirty minutes later, firewood in hand but no meat.
She and Nick broke the firewood down into short pieces while Eli dug two holes, explaining as he worked that he was building a ‘darknight fire.’
“It’ll be smokeless,” he said. “And it won’t cast much light. Darknight fires aren’t great for keeping warm, but they’re decent enough for cooking and boiling water.”
Fascinated despite herself, Mara watched as he reached down into one of the twin holes he’d dug, his arm disappearing up to the elbow as he carved out a small tunnel connecting the two.
“We’ll build the fire in this one,” he said, gesturing to the slightly larger pit. “And air will come in from the other to feed it. Nicky, you got the kindling?”
Nick handed over a bundle of sticks, kneeling opposite Eli and mirroring his posture–down on one knee, forearm braced across his thigh. Mara was too tired to interpret her reaction to the sight of her son modeling himself after a man who was not his father. She only knew how it felt–like someone had cinched a rope down around her heart and was yanking it tighter every time it tried to beat.
The fire, true to its name, didn’t lend any light to the looming darkness beyond a shallow dome of orange just over the opening, and only a pale wisp of smoke issued forth, breaking apart into nothing before it reached the lowest branches of the trees.
Nonetheless, they were able to boil pot after pot of water over the hidden flames, setting the water aside in open water flasks to cool as they munched on their dwindling supply of food. Soon enough, full dark had fallen and Nick had fallen too, deeply asleep in Mara’s lap, his hand wrapped in her shirt.
Eli stood and went to the shelter, stomping on the ground to clear the bugs away before spreading her sleeping roll beneath it. “I can put him down,” he said when he was done, but Mara shook her head.
“I’ll do it.” To her relief, he didn’t argue. Though when she stood, putting her weight as well as Nick’s on her battered feet, part of her wished she’d accepted his offer. Trying not to limp, she carried her son the short distance to the shelter. Knelt and tugged off his boots and outerwear before tucking him beneath the blankets.
She had half a mind simply to collapse beside him and fall asleep fully clothed. But Ashfall was more dangerous than Loftland, which meant they probably needed a night guard. She would share that burden with Eli even if she had to fight him for it, even if it killed her. Which, at this point, it might do.
Climbing wearily back to her feet, she returned to where Eli sat, watching another pot of water boil.
“I can finish this,” she said as she sank down beside him. “If you want to get some rest.”
“Let’s take care of your feet first.”
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“They’re fine.”
He didn’t even look at her. “Judging by the way you’re walking, you’ve got open blisters. You know as well as I do, if you keep walking on them they’ll get inflamed, and then we’ll have a problem I might not be able to solve.”
“It’s not a big deal. It can wait until you get some rest.”
“Or we could do it now.”
Giving up the act, Mara leaned back on her aching hands. “Do I have to take my boots off?” The thought of doing so, and of dragging her saturated socks from her battered feet, made her want to cry. Better to just leave them in there and let them rot off in their own time.
Eli pulled the bubbling pot of water from the fire with a sturdy stick and set it aside. “Yes. It’s best to wash them first, so I’m not knitting the flesh back together over foreign matter.”
She cringed, but dutifully tugged off her boots.
Tried to.
All day she’d been walking, in pain but not crippled by it. But sitting down for a while, giving her feet a rest, seemed to have made everything worse instead of better. Her fingers shook as she unlaced the boots, and the sharp pain of merely shifting one against her heel had her biting down and fighting a whimper.
“Stop.” Eli moved to kneel at her feet. “I’ll do it.”
“I can take off my own boots.”
“Obviously. But it’ll go faster if you let me help.”
Mara closed her eyes, trying to decide if her head was spinning because she was going to faint or if she was just getting swept away by the deluge of humiliation. Blisters, of all things. She’d given birth and hadn’t been such a baby about it. Then again, she’d had Davy at her side the whole time she labored, stroking her hair, letting her squeeze his hand, feeding her little sips of chilled water…
“It’s going to hurt, but just for a second. I’ll be quick.” Eli’s voice broke through her bizarre fantasy, one hand gripping her left boot, the other bracing her calf. “Deep breath.”
She leaned back on her elbows, pulled in a deep breath, and didn’t, to the benefit of her tattered pride, make a noise as he tugged the boot off in one swift motion. Then the other. And then her socks, and at that she did make a sound–just a small one, a grunt in the back of her throat.
“Done.” She opened her eyes and pushed up onto her hands. Eli sat by her feet, one leg outstretched, her ankles propped on his thigh so the raw flesh of her heels wasn’t resting on the ground. There ought to have been a strange intimacy in the contact, in the heat of his leg against her calf. But intimacy required tenderness, and there was nothing tender or sentimental in the way he handled her. To her relief, his touch was brusque, fingers firm and businesslike as he lifted her feet one by one, examining them by the moonlight.
“You should have let me fix this when we stopped this morning,” he said curtly.
“I didn’t think they were that bad.”
He didn’t dignify that lie with a response–not so much as a raised eyebrow or a dry glance. He reached for the pot of water. “Would you like something for the pain?”
She did, very much. But she wasn’t about to burn a pain elixir for blisters.
“I’m fine.”
He didn’t dignify that with a response either. “Go ahead and lay back.”
“I won’t faint.”
“Suit yourself.”
She did, ultimately, lay back, though she’d have liked to note that it was a voluntary effort. Not at all a response to the obscene, disproportionate pain of having her ravaged feet doused in warm water, cleaned with soap, and doused again. Not at all because she became so lightheaded from the pain she couldn’t remember which direction was up and the only way to stay attached to the earth was to place her back against it.
She knew, logically, that broad, shallow wounds often hurt worse than deep ones. There were more nerves at the surface of the skin. But still… that blisters should be her undoing was simply unacceptable, so when a haze of darkness crept in at the edges of her vision, she squeezed her eyes shut and forced herself to take deep, forceful breaths.
The now-familiar burn of Eli’s magic replaced the screaming, stabbing pain of the water, and the darkness ebbed and waned. In less than a minute, it was over, and she sat up, a little wobbly and very embarrassed but free of pain.
“I’d recommend sleeping with your feet bare, tonight,” Eli said, “And you should change your socks when we stop for lunch. The damp does as much harm as the friction.”
“Okay,” she said weakly.
“Go ahead and wash your hands.” He handed her a bar of soap and she obediently scrubbed her raw hands clean, the pain of her scraped-up palms a distant, bearable burn compared to her feet.
When she was done, Eli washed his own hands before taking the water away and sloshing it into the woods. When he returned, he held out his hand. She placed hers in it and he closed his eyes, and heat rushed into her hand, up her arm, across her chest, and down to the other hand. Both her palms throbbed with the beat of her heart, but she’d only counted three beats before the heat was replaced by cool.
“Better?” he asked, releasing her hand, and she turned her palms over, wondering at the unbroken flesh. She wiggled her toes as well, her feet marvelously pain free. Next time–not that she wanted there to be a next time, but there probably would–she resolved to watch instead of closing her eyes. It would be fascinating to watch the flesh stitch back together.
“That really is amazing,” she said. She’d never had the opportunity to work with a healer. Though she understood the theory of that branch of innate magic, she’d rarely seen it in action. “And it really doesn’t take too much energy?”
He shook his head, moving away to sit against his pack. “It’s easier than persuasive magic,” he said, with surprising honesty. “If persuasion is like walking up a hill, healing is flat terrain. There’s still an expenditure, but the proportions are different, relative to what you’re accomplishing.” His tone changed as he spoke, lightening up and turning inward like he was sharing something he’d thought of often but never said out loud. “I think it’s because healing means working with the object of the magic rather than against them. You’re using their own body, their own healing capacity, just encouraging it all to work faster. The only time it’s really a struggle is when you’re working against what the body wants–cooling fevers, easing swelling, things like that. With persuasive magic, you’re always working against them. Fighting whatever it is they want to think or feel.”
“Davy said shadow-casting was a drain,” she offered, and he nodded thoughtfully. “But only when he was fighting active persuasion. He said weaving shields was easier. Maybe it’s the same principle.”
“Makes sense.” He didn’t say more, and she frowned at his silhouette in the darkness.
“Would you like to get some sleep? I can keep watch the first half of the night.” He cocked his head at her like a puzzled dog, and before he could say something to annoy her, she went on. “Since we’re not in Loftland anymore, we need to be more watchful. You said as much yesterday, when I asked. I assume that’s true at night as well as it is during the day.” She paused, giving him time to argue the point, but he didn’t. “So what was your plan? To stay awake every night from here to the Enclave?”
His expression tightened. Mara’s did too–a tangible pressure where her teeth ground together and her brow pinched.
“Was that your plan?” she pushed, incredulous.
Poignant, pointed silence answered her.
“Eli, that’s the stupidest…” She broke off, shaking her head. “People need sleep. You’re a healer. You know that. People die when they don’t sleep.”
He shrugged and, finally, spoke. “Not necessarily. We only sleep so our brains have time to repair the damage we do during the day with all our thinking. I don’t need to sleep to repair that damage.” Just like he didn’t need potions or stitches to repair a wound. Healers, Mara decided, were an infuriating breed. She was grateful she’d never had to deal with one before.
“That’s not the only reason we sleep,” she argued, thinking of the sanctum of her dreams, even before Davy’s death, and of the advice her mother had given her as a child. Sleep on it, she used to say, every time Mara got angry with a friend or thought her heart had been irrevocably broken by some childish loss. You’ll feel different in the morning. “We sleep for rest, and for reflection. There’s value in dreams.”
“It’s not going to kill me.”
Perhaps not, but she wasn’t ready to concede the point. She wouldn’t concede the point.
“Fine, but that doesn’t mean you’re not sharing the night shift with me. Just because you could doesn’t mean you have to.”
“I can handle it, Mara.”
She met his eyes as well as she could in the darkness.
“So can I.”