Dani turned the girl face-up, careful to not deepen any of the wounds she had. I was at once struck by the beauty of her face. She had sharp features but there was a certain amount of vulnerability in them as well. There were smears of turmeric paste on her cheeks as well. She was barely being able to keep her eyes open and was moaning constantly. I realised that she was holding a number of small plants in her hand.
“Hey,” Lia said to her softly.
“Please… help me,” the girl moaned such that we could barely hear her. Rain was also pelting down and that didn’t help at all. Considering the circumstances it had been a pure miracle that I had seen her at all.
“Maybe you can try to heal her?” I said to Lia. Lia nodded. She placed her hands on the chest of the girl and closed her eyes. Lia’s face contorted with pain and for a moment I wanted to tell her to stop healing the girl. Healing was a gift that came with a lot of pain. But seeing the girl able to open her eyes properly, I decided to let Lia do her thing.
By the time Lia lifted her hands from the girl’s chest and slumped onto me, much drained of energy, the girl was able to sit up on her own with some assistance from Dani. Her blood was clotting faster now. We removed some of the splinters of wood that were sticking to her, but left the ones which had penetrated too deep as we feared that removing them right now might lead to loss of more blood.
There was a sparkle in the eyes of the girl that for some reason I found very attractive.
“Who are you?” I found myself asking her. The rain pelting down was by now making my head ache. I was sure I would catch a fever. But there was no where we could take shelter.
“I am Slia,” the girl answered. She looked down at her hand with which she was holding the small plants, “In a few days I will be married and I was carrying out a ritual that involves collecting certain plants from the forest.”
I reckoned that the smears of turmeric she had on her were also part of the ritual.
“Where are you from?” Dani asked. Meanwhile, Lia who had been using me for support after the energy drainage from having healed the girl, sat straighter, the colour returning to her face.
“I am from the village of Collosi,” the girl Slia said, “it’s not far away from here.”
“You don’t happen to be Wahaki, do you?” I asked Slia, noting that she didn’t have any tattoos on her body. Slia shook her head rather earnestly.
“No, the Wahaki are enemies of our tribe,” she said. Well, at least that was a good thing.
“Are there healers in your village?” Lia asked.
“Yes,” Slia said.
“In that case we must take you there fast,” Lia said, “the rain has weakened me and I was only able to use my powers to order your blood in the wounds to cloth for a certain duration of time. After a while the healing magic will lose its effect and you will start bleeding again. Why did you come alone for the ritual?”
“It’s part of the ritual to come alone,” Slia answered, “I came to the forest during sunrise and got too lost collecting herbs and didn’t see the dark clouds gathering above. Only when the lightning bolts began to fall when I realised of the storm, but I got too scared and couldn’t get back to my village fast.”
“Can you show us the way to your village?” Dani asked. The girl nodded.
“Will you be able to walk?” I said. She looked down at her legs and there were splinters of wood that had pierced deep into her thighs. She shook her head.
“Then you carry her,” Lia said to me. I lifted up the girl with my arms. I was careful to not touch any of her wounds, but at the same time holding her supple figure I couldn’t help but feel a little aroused. I shook my head, suppressing those thoughts.
We made slow progress through the forest. Every few minutes lightning would strike the forest. If not for the rain, the forest would have been blazing by now. I was so glad that lightning of this sort never came to my kingdom in the civilised realm. The residents of the barbaric realm sure were hardy people and it was a wonder that they had been able to carve out a living in the barbaric realm despite all the monsters present here and despite the weird natural phenomena taking place here. The ground had also become slippery and I had to be extra careful. I didn’t want to slip and fall by any instance because Slia would go down with me.
Slia kept giving us directions, but the energy in her voice was slowly fading, and I couldn’t help but observe that that wounds in her body were beginning to ooze blood and the clothed blood was liquefying as Lia’s healing magic was slowly wearing off it.
It was nearly an hour later that we reached the village of the girl. The entire village was covered by a transparent magical dome. Whenever a bolt of lightning hit this magical dome, the lightning bolt got deflected back to the sky. Also only a certain amount of the rain was allowed by the magical dome to fall into the village. There were guards at the gate of the village and seeing us carrying Slia they ran to us.
“She is injured,” I said to the guards. By this time Slia had become unconscious and blood was leaking out of her wounds fast. One of the guards immediately took Slia from me and then carried her away fast to the village. Another guard told us that Slia was the daughter of the chieftain of the village.
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“Come with me,” the guard said, “the chieftain would want to see you because you have brought his daughter. You can also dry off and have hot soup in his home. You must be feeling very cold.”
The chieftain’s house was the largest in the village and located not far from the village gate. The chieftain came out of the house with his hands clasped in thankfulness.
“The healers say that she will survive,” the chieftain said. “If you hadn’t brought her, she would have perished. And that too one week away from her marriage!”
We were led inside a room in the house that had a fireplace and were also given towels and new clothes. The clothes were of course much different from our own clothes in appearance. I hadn’t appreciated the presence of a fire near me more my entire life.
We were also brought hot water and soup. However as we were having the soup, a rather short man came running to the house of the chieftain and declared that someone had died. The chieftain grabbed his hair and cried and the other men and women of the household sobbed too.
“Who died?” I asked a servant of the household.
“Slia’s groom,” the servant answered with a sad face, “Like Slia he too was out gathering specific plants for the wedding ritual. He was struck by a bolt of lightning and his lifeless body was discovered.”
Those words felt like a knife stabbing into me. I had known Slia for barely a couple of hours, but I still felt very sad that her groom had died just before her wedding. It felt so unfair.
“We could have met a similar death,” Lia said staring fixedly at the floor. I agreed, it was a pure miracle that we had survived.
The chieftain and a few people of the household went away to the nearby village to which Slia’s groom belonged. A few other members of the household stayed back to take care of Slia who had yet to completely recover. The dark clouds in the sky had lightened considerably and the lightning bolts had thankfully stopped so it was safe for the chieftain and the others to leave the safety of the magical dome that surrounded the village and to go to the groom’s village.
We were given a guest room to rest. It was a pleasure to lie down on a bed for the first time in weeks. Lia and Dani fell asleep. We had certainly had a very hard morning and my body was aching all over. I however couldn’t go back to sleep. I wanted to continue on the quest to get to Rozy. But seeing Dani and Lia so tired I didn’t want to wake them up. My mind began to drift off to the time when I had first met Rozy.
It was one of those days when I would put on a disguise and go out of the castle. I needn’t be a king on such days and I enjoyed them a lot. Despite my royal upbringing I had never been particularly fond of royal customs and royal manners of speech, even though I understood their importance and on such days I could mix with the common folk and really get to know them better.
The day I met Rozy I had gone to a bazaar not far from the castle. I had been walking about the bazaar, taking joy in not being surrounded by guards. The bazaar was bustling with the chatter of people. Traders calling out to people to try out their products, children crying out to their parents to buy them something, customers trying to get down the price of a product through stiff arguments with traders, the smell of spices and what not.
I was going from one shop to the other, not buying anything but keenly observing the items available in shops. Then I reached a particular trader who was selling magical objects of different kinds. He had magical gemstones that could bring one luck, bones of animals that could slow down the rate of mana consumption by spells and similar items, all of which had hefty price tags attached to them. From past experience, I knew well that even though the magical objects actually worked they only did so for a limited amount of time.
There were two people at that particular shop, a man and a woman. Their exotic appearances told me that they were from a different region. I thought the woman looked strikingly beautiful, but she had an expression of desperation pasted on her face, as did the man. The trader was shaking his head and asking them to go.
“What’s the problem?” I found myself asking the trader, who was looking at the man and the woman like they were being a nuisance to him. The woman seemed to be offering a pair of earrings to the traders and he was not interested in them. I wonder why a customer was offering a product to a trader.
“Look at them,” the plump traders said, “they want to have my most expensive ring in exchange for a pair of earrings that are not worth a tenth of what my ring is worth!”
“Please, these are made of pure gold,” the woman was saying. Her voice was soft and very lady-like but there was an edge to it that told me that she might have had a rough upbringing.
The trader shook his head.
“Sorry, the ring costs more than the earrings. Please go.”
“Please understand, we need the ring,” the man said.
“What does the ring do?” I asked the trader.
“Anybody who wears the ring needn’t eat anything for a month,” the trader said to me in a tone of pride. “Would you like to buy it, sir?”
I definitely didn’t need the ring. I wondered if the man and the woman wanted the ring so much, it must be because they didn’t have the money to buy things to eat for a month. Just then the woman’s eyes went wide and the next thing I knew was that she had embraced me and both of us were falling down. I saw an arrow whizzing past me and hit the wooden pole of a shop. I hit the ground on my back rather hard and let out a grunt.
The woman however was back to her feet in seconds. Her hands magically turned to chains and she shot these chains to a person with a bow about a hundred feet away. The archer tried to flee, but the chains bind his legs and dragged him all the way to where we were.
A few soldiers standing not far away rushed towards us.
“What’s going on?” one soldier asked, looking at the man bound by chain with a hard frown.
“He shot an arrow at him,” the woman said to the soldier, gesturing at me.
“What? Why?” the soldier said.
I looked at the face of the archer and I suddenly recalled having seen him not far from the gate of my castle when I was leaving it today. He was an assassin. There were always people in one’s kingdom, intent on killing you regardless of how you ruled.
“I think I know,” I said. I took of my disguise. The soldiers gasped as did several of the people near us.
“It’s the king!” they said.
After I asked the soldiers to take the archer to the prison, I thanked the woman for saving me and asked her name, which she said was Rozy.
“And you are her husband?” I asked the man with Rozy.
“No Your Highness,” the man said in a humble manner. “She is just a good friend of mine.” The man said that his name was Ramda. I further asked the two of them why they needed the ring so much and they told me that they had come from the barbaric realm and didn’t have any money to buy food. I was surprised at meeting people from the barbaric realm in my own kingdom from the first time. Ramda said that he had to leave soon to the barbaric lands, while Rozy would be remaining in my kingdom and living alone. Since Rozy had saved me from the assassin, I invited her to live in the guest quarters of my castle for a while, at least until she could come up with a way to make a living for herself and get used to the ways of the civilised realm. Living in the castle, I would frequently meet Rozy. I would ask her questions about the barbaric realm, a part of the world that the civilised people barely knew anything about. Over time I began to like her as a person, and before I knew I had fallen in love with her, which eventually led to me marrying her.