Chapter Fifty-Seven

The Pains That Make Us

Michael was six cycles old.

The pain had taken him back. Oh, so far back.

He was back in Istol, looking around at the cramped houses and narrow streets as the late summer sun beat down on him. Michael ambled down the side-streets, passing the tired and homeless and the busy and bickering, and it was hardly a far walk but he still hoped that Alvin the Tinker would make his rounds early and give him a ride up the main street. Carter and James were away today, on another trip to Ariaton.

He knew now, of course, they were living in a different world, fighting monsters and training to be warriors. What he would’ve given to know it.

Michael found himself wandering his way through to the busier section of main road, nearing Istol’s middle-class district. This was about as far as he dared to wander across Istol, because despite getting the occasional glare from the guardsmen it was nothing compared to what would happen if he were caught on Bright-Side. Regular guards had a superiority complex. It was something to do with the armour and sword. But Bright-Side guards were another thing entirely. It was as though the mere existence of anyone who didn’t spend Silver Talies was a personal insult to their way of life.

They were fanatical. Like if classism had priests. Blood was their deity, or rather the vintage of it. And on the days where blood didn’t carry enough weight, gold would do the trick.

Michael always knew this… but he didn’t know it. Everyone knows what it takes to drown. You just stop swimming. But knowing it when you’re still kicking, and when you’re legs start to grow tired, are two very different kinds of understanding.

It took the smell of pumpernickel bread for Michael to learn such a truth.

That was it.

It perfumed the air all the way through Mid-Side. He followed it like a trail, hopping through open doors when no one was looking, creeping out along freshly cut lawns. He slipped into a bakery through a low window in an alley, into the small kitchen before jumping out another window again, all without so much as leaving a footprint in flour dust or a catching a disgruntled curse from a kitchenhand.

Michael even swiped the loaf as he ran. It was second nature. It was still warm in his hand when he tore pieces off as he went, uncaring about the direction he walked in. It was good. It had garlic baked in.

So good, that it was some time before he noticed how clean the streets were. How many fewer people were walking around. How much less noise there seemed to be. It wasn’t until he turned and saw the black sigil of the emperor blowing in the breeze of a guardsman’s cloak that he realised.

Michael tried to run. He was quick. Most of the Dim-Side guards were drunk on duty. He was used to outrunning them. It was game that he and his friends sometimes played when they were on solo patrol.

His feet hit the cobbles and he wasn’t sure when they got so cold or when the sun had gone down, but it did. The darkness rose up about him. It choked him, made his movements hesitant and his mind panicked and indecisive. He began to cry out as he darted toward an unfamiliar alleyway.

Many stuck their heads out of homes and taverns to see what was happening. A dozen or so people wandered out to the streets like a gauntlet of judging eyes. They were wearing nightgowns, watching distantly, like statues. Like they were attending a show.

He felt a metal shove against his back and Michael went crashing to the ground, cracking his forehead against the cobbles.

Everything swam in blacks and reds and he couldn’t even scream for the pain. He later found that notion ironic. Like being too cold rub your hands together.

He tried to force himself up, still blind, when an unmistakable stamp of a boot hit him in the small of his back.

Michael found his voice again when his hand and elbow bent to a hideous shape beneath his body. Michael cried as he rolled onto his back and looked up at the guard through the intricate gaps in his polished iron helmet.

Against the shining moon, for the strangest moment, Michael wondered if he was what people thought of when they envisioned Rii, the Holy Seraph of Light.

“You don’t belong here, wretch. And you made me run six blocks.” He didn’t seem out of breath.

Michael still remembered what the guard drawing his baton sounded like. It was a dull noise. A cold, dense noise. Long and grating, yet it wasn’t dignified, like the tune sung by a sword. It was muted and short and had no music at all, like an axe splitting wood.

The guard hit Michael twelve times with the cudgel. He only stopped when Michael went still. And Michael only went still because he was about to die.

Make no mistake, he didn’t play dead. He often believed if he needed to then he could. But in the moment, Michael realised there would be no playing. No pretending. If he gave even the lightest gesture to the dark, even as an act, it would reach out and take his hand, like his mother helping him down from the cart.

He was dying, so he went still.

It was as simple as that.

When the sun came up again, he was still there, unable to move. Later he found out that his arm was broken in two places. His hand was shattered in four. His skull had a fracture and his face was all but unrecognisable. His leg was so damaged that a Dim-Side surgeon hadn’t even wanted to examine him, and that was before he’d found his five broken ribs. But that’s skipping forward.

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Michael lay in a pool of his own blood, watching as the red rivers cornered and flowed down the grooves in the cobbles. He wondered rather earnestly why he wasn’t dead.

He supposed he ought to move. The thought of dying in Bright-Side actually brought him considerable embarrassment. He would later laugh about that thought.

The worst was when he had to drag himself out of the dead-end alley. He knew better than to think anyone might stop to help him when he could all but imagine the trail of crimson he’d left behind.

Finally, he made his way to a tavern on the edge of the main road, connecting Bright-Side to Mid-Side. By the time he made it there, however, the wagons had already begun rolling through, headed for their markets, and Michael knew a dying peasant would be little more than a bump in the road if he got in their way. He sat against the alley wall of the Bright-Side tavern where no one could see him. He focused on breathing and staying still and could feel every breath press against his shattered ribs and the trickle of warm blood drying in his hair. It was near Steading when a real motivation to move showed up.

The guard was stood speaking to a well-dressed lady in a green gown that flowed at her feet. Her black hair tumbled lightly around her kind face. Her dark skin was flawless and her graceful neck was decorated in silver and gold. Michael felt as though merely looking at her would heal him.

When the guardsman felt the need to demonstrate a grand unsheathing of his sword, the lady sighed and caught Michael’s eye from up the street. She looked at him for a long moment, caught in disbelief before abandoning her conversation with the guard and sprinting over to the fallen boy. She hiked up her green dress so she could run and came skidding a stop beside him, overwhelmed with shock.

She smelled of jasmine, Michael remembered.

A part of him wanted to stay in that moment, until he saw the flash of the guardsman’s cloak as he stormed toward them both, locking his cold eyes on Michael as he ripped his steel helmet onto his head of blonde hair.

Michael tried to move but pain screamed up his torso and across his arm like he’d been pierced with boiling steel. He made the unwise decision to move as quickly as possible and tried to push off the ground with his right hand, feeling the broken bone push down on the inner mush of his arm, like a jagged dagger through warm candlewax. Michael gargled a scream as he slipped again, unable to stand or run, collapsing into the woman’s hands.

The lady in green was bombarded with looks of concern and confusion, catching him barely before he hit the cobblestone.

Michael mumbled in a trembling mess of words, “N-n- no I’ll stain your dress.”

He thought it was a perfectly fair concern, but the look of heartbreak in her eyes confused him.

She glanced from Michael to the approaching guard, suddenly overcome with a look of understanding. She sat him down and stood in a fit of anger and screamed at the guard.

Michael couldn’t hear her over the carts. For some reason they were so loud. He watched the guardsman push roughly passed the woman and draw his sword. Michael did recall the sound of it being unsheathed. Admittedly it sounded better, though he didn’t think the guard deserved the moment.

The guardsman raised his blade and Michael shut his eyes.

In that moment, Michael broke his own heart, because all he could manage to think was, I’m supposed to be on my feet.

But too long a moment passed and he opened his eyes again.

The man had frozen to find the lady in green standing behind him, pressing the tip of a long, slender blade between the plates in his armour. She drew up her dress to her thigh, revealing another hidden black handled, silver bladed knife, identical to the first. She unsheathed it and tapped the cold silver against his sword-hand.

The guard’s iron clattered to the cobblestones.

The lady in green forced the guard against the wall and sheathed one knife, then using her free hand, roughly ripped off his helmet.

A head of silvery-blonde hair tumbled down onto his breast plate and over his shoulders. She dragged him out onto the street, the knife still pressed against his neck. It took only a moment or two for half a dozen guards to run over, swords drawn.

Michael went to stand and help but the pain was so bad he all but blacked out upon trying. He tried to shout, to tell her to run. But his throat had half-closed for swelling and not a word came forth.

He needn’t have worried, for as the guards drew closer, they appeared to recognise her, sheathing their swords in an instant.

Michael was bewildered, or perhaps would have been if he was in less pain. When he refocused again, the soldiers were rising from bows, taking the unmasked guard and clapping him in irons.

Michael had known it purely on by the way she held herself. She was a gentlewoman. A lady at least, perhaps a baroness. The quality of her dress was enough to know that.

He used the moment of distraction to drag himself away once more, screaming into the inner recesses of himself. Leaving a quaint trail of blood behind, he made his across the cobble. He made his way to the main road, barely avoiding being run over and trampled. Every passing trader and traveller cursed or glared. Some spit or threw trash.

Michael cast a look back to the lady in green.

She watched as the guard was dragged away, casting slurs and other fouls things at her. After being certain he was dealt with, she turned and saw Michael had vanished. She darted back to the alley where she’d left him, searching every dark corner with tears in her eyes.

Michael considered trying to signal her but his ear twitched at a familiar sound. Tick, tick, wreeet, tick, tick, wreeet, tick, tick. The sound of rusted and worn wheels, groaning and clicking beneath Alvin’s cart. Michael looked up, finding himself face to face with the tired horse, Rusty. Rusty nuzzled the familiar boy and stopped walking. The gruff old man yelled at his horse to keep on but Rusty only gave a low whinny. Alvin leapt down, cursing and grumbling until he spotted Michael.

“What in Enthall- Oh God, no, no, Mikey. Can you hear me, lad?” he wheezed beneath his straw hat.

The lady in green saw Michael at the same moment.

His ears still hot with blood and pain, he didn’t hear their conversation but he did understand the tone.

Old Man Alvin thanked her whole-heartedly, kissing her hand in the bend of his bow. She personally helped hoist Michael onto the back of the cart in-between some crates of goods. The broken bones screamed and his whole body beat to the rhythm of his heart, throbbing violently in his eardrums. Michael couldn’t speak to save his own life but he managed to roll his head and catch the eye of the lady in green one last time. He wanted to thank her but could bring about no words.

She saw his struggle and smiled softly. Her dress was stained with Michael’s blood as well as muck and dirt from the road. Regardless, she gave him the most graceful nod he’d ever seen and he remembered it when he woke up a day later, all bandaged up with his bones set by the surgeon. He lost enough blood to swim in, but, it seemed, the world wasn’t done with him yet.

It wasn’t until a spell later he realised her name was Nala. Carter’s mum. He wasn’t sure he’d managed to forget.

Somewhere, deep beneath the dream, a feeling thickened. A faraway pain. Again, and again it came.

It was only after about five minutes of feeling it in his unconscious mind that Michael realised he was being slapped.

Slapped really quite hard.