With our attackers disarmed and their spells dismissed the fight was over.
They could grab the dropped weapons and renew their incantations of course, but now that they’d brought Berenike into this I couldn’t afford to try to end things non-lethally if they tried, and they seemed to understand that.
Of everyone present I was also the only one not panting for breath, and certainly stood alone in my wholly undiminished essence, still flowing out from my body.
Not that I wasn’t hurt, a lot. My body was throbbing all over with pain, my clothes mere rags, soaked in blood and scorched to cinders, and my skin underneath was similarly abused.
Berenike came first, however.
Marcus flinched as I rushed forwards.
“Wh-what are you doing?! We surrendered!”
I didn’t spare him so much as a glare as I took the taller woman in my arms, lifting her up over my shoulder.
There were relieved exhalations as her stinger withdrew from the boy’s neck.
I was more concerned by how cold my friend felt. Her skin was like ice.
“Berenike, are you okay?” I asked as I carried her, “you’re freezing!”
“Mmmh. I’m alright now, Saf,” she said.
She sounded sleepy rather than pained, but that only worried me more.
“We have to get you warm, just… just try to stay awake. There are hot pools all around here; we can warm up in one of those.”
Small fragments of ice were falling from her feathers as I carried her, yet Berenike patted my back, as if it were she who needed to reassure me.
Liberated in my tears as I might have been, crying in front of so many strangers and enemies would still have been embarrassing, had I not been more concerned about saving the harpy’s life.
“You should… call me… Berry. S’what mothers called me,” she murmured.
“Okay, okay Berry, I’ll do that, just stay awake. Stay with me, focus on my voice!”
“You did great, Saf,” she said, words quieter still, her voice slow, “you got me out. I… I wanted to see the sky again.”
“Don’t talk like that! You’re gonna see it every day from now on!”
My vision was blurred, and I stumbled as I walked towards a steaming pool.
“Not that one,” called a voice.
Speaking out of nowhere, I didn’t understand who it was at first.
Turning my head I saw the archer, Dolm. Several of his arrows were still embedded in my body, yet now the expression under his helm was a sorrowful one.
“Treating frost, you have to warm them slow. Mix cold water with the hot, or else it’ll make the injuries worse.”
I stared at him, baffled by the sudden assistance, and visibly suspicious, but he met my eye without faltering, and he spoke with the conviction of experience.
“Trust me, I’m from Bosquerime. Never seen frostbite like this down in the Gulf, but up there we know what to do. Warm her slow and gentle, keep her awake.”
Now that I saw him, not as an enemy out to drive an arrow through my heart, but as a man just standing there, I found he had a surprisingly kind look about his comely face. His broad nose and ebony skin together with his unusual accent suggested to me he came from the South, but it seemed that wasn’t the way of Arcadia – Bosquerime must surely be a cold and icy realm instead.
His words evoked vague memories of a first aid course from long ago, and I followed his lead, carrying Berenike over to a pool further from the vents. It was around thirty feet wide, ringed by moss and small white buds, coating the rocks. The water within was warm but not steaming.
“What in the name of Soleil are you doing?” one woman demanded of Dolm, from where the others stood, huddled together and bickering.
He ignored her as he took Berenike’s feet and helped me lower her into the water.
She took a sharp breath as she was submerged.
“It hurts,” she said, clearly wide awake now, “it’s burning!”
Seeing her reaction, even if he couldn’t understand the words, Dolm spoke up again.
“Might feel too hot, but she’s gotta bear with it, just feels that way because she’s so cold. Human would have died.”
I glared at him, as he shared that less than comforting thought, but he just shrugged back.
When I made a point of tugging the remaining arrows from my flesh he had the grace to look abashed at least. His eyes went to the bloody cut on my throat.
“What about you? If we’re not fighting you need healing before you bleed out.”
But already the flood of claret had reduced to a trickle. His eyes bulged as the armored figure looked closer and realized how small the wound had become.
“We were fools, taking you on,” he muttered, shaking his head.
“Yup.”
I spared him no more words; I had more important things to say – commands to my mana, to bring forth healing, revitalizing water. Berenike needed all the help she could get, and while I might not be about to die, I was still in a lot of pain… and feeling sick and shaky, both from my injuries, and my friend’s state.
What rushed out from my palms looked like ordinary liquid, but Dolm backed off as it started to pour, retreating from the gush of essence that came with and suffused it.
Shukra had been amazed by my creation, healing water, but in truth it was nothing special – I was using an ocean of mana to produce a few drops of mild restorative. But Dolm looked on it like I had started spewing molten gold; fascination and fear blending with desire in his eyes.
Berenike had fallen silent, but frightening as it was to see her laying limply in the pool, when I leant down over her she opened her eyes and gave me a grin.
“The heat feels much better now. Think you could bring me some fruit to eat while I’m bathing?”
Despite everything, I giggled at the twinkle in her eye. Then splashed some healing water at her face.
“I’ll see what I can find later.”
“Thanks. Then we can… go flying.”
With how many feathers she’d lost, especially on her damaged wing, I wasn’t sure we’d be flying anywhere for a while, but I didn’t have the heart to tell her that. The harpy didn’t have the energy to keep talking either, so I just let her rest.
She sank down into the pool, laying her head against a rounded stone, and I kept the flow of fresh water coming.
Our attackers were grouped up some distance away, out of the radius of the geysers, cleaning and binding their own injuries and talking, but I didn’t sense they had much fight left in them either.
Finally I was starting to feel like we might just be okay.
It was a miracle that no-one was badly hurt. If I’d been even a little less careful things wouldn’t have gone that way.
“What is that?” Lyanna asked.
I hadn’t noticed her, standing away from the group, but the young woman had approached while I was chanting.
Her damaged chest-piece unbuckled, she was applying magic of her own to her midriff, but hers was a subtler, directed form of healing.
With her helmet also off, her long, pleated black hair fell down the side of her armor, and her pretty face showed off her strong chin and nose. Her sword arm hung limply at her side. I wondered if she’d broken it when she snapped her sword stabbing me in the throat.
I felt little sympathy for her if she had.
Her rosy lips pursed as I glared over at her, but she waited for me to reply.
“It’s healing water,” I said simply, as I poured it into Berenike’s pool.
Splashes wet the mossy rocks around my feet, and the tiny plants reacted. They grew slowly, but the change was noticeable where several of the buds started to open into flowers. As water kept pouring out, slowly overflowing, the tiny stream leading away from the pool teemed with new growth.
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“That’s not healing magic?”
“No, it’s simpler than what you’re doing. Just water that’s full of essence, conveying… life force I suppose.”
“The Water of Life?!”
“That’s what the Harpies called it too. Well the Witch Laureate did.”
“The who?” Dolm asked, confused.
“Forget that,” Lyanna cut in, “this… this is really water that can heal without draining vitality?!”
I gave a resentful half-nod, but I was willing to humor Lyanna thanks to Dolm’s help – and the slowly improving color on Berenike’s face under the shower I was providing.
I remembered also the tears and anguish Lyanna had shown, as she spoke of her mother.
“Look, don’t get your hopes up. It’s still just natural healing and growth, so it takes a toll on the body, the water just provides energy for it. At least, that’s how I think it works. I doubt it’ll fix a broken arm either, before you ask.”
It might have helped if the injury were exposed more directly to it. If I was able to meet her again I should talk to Sulis about whether my water might be of use as a medium for her healing spells. But at least for the present internal injuries weren’t something I dared mess with.
As I was explaining I had also directed a one half of the flow to myself, holding a hand up to my neck. The relief was immediate, the pain soothed, and while the waters cascading down my body drew thick plumes of red initially, they soon ran clear.
“Never mind arms,” Lyanna said.
There was a feverish gleam in her eye that made me wonder if she was sick somehow.
“Do you have any idea how… how precious this water is? The spells to create it are a secret of the temples, and they charge a whole gold piece for a single vial of it! Alchemists can’t get enough! And you’re just pouring it on the ground!”
Her good hand fumbled with her pack, and she tugged out a waterskin, which she started frantically trying to empty out.
“It’s mine to do as I please with – I’m the one making it. There’s no point trying to bottle it anyway, it reverts to normal water after a while. Probably less than a day.”
“I have to at least try,” she insisted.
Once again I could see something in her expression. There was a dangerous, desperate glint in Lyanna’s eyes. Like recognized like as our gazes met; she wore look of a woman pushed too far, driven into desperation.
“Please….”
Empathy melted the walls around my heart as I saw too the pain and longing written in the forced calm of her features. She was holding herself together, for her friends and her team, but I could feel the same simmering anxiety that had blighted me throughout the Underworld.
“I’m sorry, Lyanna. I can give you some if you want, but it won’t work.”
Lyanna’s hand fell to her side, the last sad glugs of water sloshing out down her leg.
“Would my Water of Life really be able to save your mother?” I asked quietly.
“I… don’t know. If it’s the same thing the temples make then it could at least stop her… getting any weaker…. They told us with enough she might recover, but… she hasn’t woken up in seven years now….”
Seven years. Lyanna looked of an age with me, which meant that she must have lost her mother somewhere in her early teens.
Dolm put a hand on her good arm, and she leant against his shoulder, looking exhausted as she continued working on healing her injuries.
“Temple are keeping her alive with the Water,” the man explained, “but no-one knows what caused it.”
“I’m sorry… that sounds terrible. But even if I give you a whole barrel of the Water, it won’t do any good by the time to take it back to… Bellwood right?”
She gave a small nod, eyes on the rocks under my feet.
“You’ll just have to bring me there instead.”
“What?”
“To Bellwood.”
Lyanna looked lost.
“I said that I’d help you treat your mother.”
“You meant that?” Lyanna asked, staring at me. “Even after we… attacked you?”
My neck throbbed and my face darkened.
“I’m still angry about that.”
The other wounds all over my body were hurting too, however the water was doing its work well.
“But even if that was a horrible thing you did to me… that doesn’t mean your mom deserves to die. There’s a lot going on in the Cyclopean Bones right now – you probably noticed – well I have to help the people here first. My friends and… people I owe a lot… but once things are settled, if I’m still alive and kicking I’ll do whatever I can to help your mom.”
“You’ve… never met her though?”
“What does that have to do with it? She’s a living being isn’t she? She’s not the one who tried to cut my throat, either.”
Lyanna was looking at me as though she was more certain than ever that I wasn’t human.
I stood up from the poolside, and looked myself up and down.
Patch’s clothes were little more than a patchwork of holes now, torn and tragic. Even the gods couldn’t have made the fragments of leather and fabric whole again – the majority of the material was gone entirely. The skin beneath, however, that was getting back to normal. Already my neck-wound, where I’d focused the water, was sealed.
I couldn’t entirely blame anyone who questioned my humanity, but as my skin was repaired it became increasingly difficult to ignore that I was almost naked. Again.
Looking up, I caught Dolm’s gaze lingering on the pudgy skin of my upper thighs and butt, where it bulged a little through the web of ruined pants.
I stared at him, and saw him turn his head away quickly.
“I’m getting used to my clothes being ruined due to attempts on my life, but I think the people responsible could at least keep their eyes to themselves.”
“Sorry,” he said quickly.
“You nearly did a lot more than ruin my clothes too, you know.”
“Yeah… sorry about that too.”
“I’m… truly, very sorry.” Lyanna said, giving a slow and earnest nod.
I narrowed my eyes at the pair.
“That’s it? You’re just going to say ‘sorry I tried to kill you Safkhet, I thought we could get some gold for your corpse,’ and that’s that?”
Dolm looked ready to respond, but Lyanna spoke first. “He went along with it for my sake. For mom. But we… we never imagined you weren’t a monster. Since that first run-in we’ve spent weeks trying to catch you, thinking we never would, or that we’d die trying, but it never even occurred to us to wonder if you were really a mimic or not. Don’t you realize how… terrifying you are? It’s like there’s an immense weight on my chest just standing near you. It was hard to breathe at first. It still is!”
“She’s right,” Dolm added, “like trying to face down a goddess in the flesh or something. Even before you started… letting all that mana out… we were sure you were a monster. When some naked girl shows up in a famously deadly forest, speaking perfect Hronan, weapons bouncing off her what else would you expect? Whatever you really are, no-one’ll believe you’re not a monster come to raze the town if you show up in Bellwood.”
I sighed. I couldn’t perceive things that way, given that I was the source, but I was starting to realize how much harder it was going to be for me to interact with anyone outside of the mountains.
That also made things with Lyanna’s mother still more complicated, but I’d worry about that if I lived through the Pharyes invasion first.
“Well whatever people might believe, I’m still a person,” I said, with a glum tone of resignation, “and your lot are too, so if they’re not too terrified of my spooky mana, maybe they’d like to get over here and heal themselves in the water.”
The duo stared at me once more.
“Oh come on, after how hard I tried not to kill any of them the last thing I want is for someone to get an infection and die on the way home. Besides, at least one of them isn’t a bad person. That fox-guy… he saved Berenike’s life.”
“Reynard,” Lyanna said.
She wore a complex expression as she spoke the name, but she and Dolm went to go talk to him anyway, to see if he and the others would deign to join my harpy friend and me in the healing bath.
“So what are they saying?” Berenike asked quietly. “Are they going to try and attack us again?”
With how naturally the different tongues came to me, I’d forgotten that Berenike couldn’t understand a word of the human speech.
“I don’t think so – I don’t think they’re that stupid – and anyway, Lyanna at least doesn’t want to fight any more. She needs me, since I might be able to save her mother’s life.”
Berenike listened to the strange story of the hunters and our previous meeting in silence, but by the end of it she was grinning once more.
“You really do have the worst luck, Saf.”
Her hand found mine in the water, and gave it a squeeze. I squeezed back.
“I’m just glad it didn’t rub off on you, Berry.”
~~~
“This for real?” Reynard asked, ears flat against his head.
He could feel the puffing fur on his tail too, but as obvious as his body-language might be, his swollen and bloodied face showed the same dismay just as clearly.
“I don’t think she’s lying,” Lyanna said, “Safkhet’s grateful to you, for saving the harpy. Seems like they’re friends.”
That made little more sense than the invitation itself. Reynard was sure harpies did have friends, just as naga, or indeed humans did, but at least to his mind the relationship was like razorfly befriending a dragon.
Looking past the weight of essence that she exuded in all directions the girl was actually rather unassuming, small, pretty… attractive in fact… but it was hard not to see the menacing mountain of energy primed to collapse upon him at any moment.
Invited as he was to share a bath with her, Reynard found he would have preferred the dragon.
Still, his nose was throbbing, a hot, burning pain where it had been crushed in the melee. Their only healer, Lyanna had treated the most serious injuries already, such as the cut on his hand, but she ran out of mana well before she got to something as simple as a broken nose.
“Don’t worry about it,” Dolm advised him, “whatever she is, she’s a good kid. She’s grateful for your help.”
“Help?” Elmina asked, grimacing, “call it what it is, betrayal. Coulda had them if not for you, fox.”
There were dark murmurs of assent from many of the other hunters. They were gathered some distance away from their bathing enemy, discussing what to do next.
“No, we could not have,” Jalera said simply. “We should only have succeeded in making it serious.”
“What in the name of Soleil do you call that fight, if not serious?” Marcus demanded bitterly.
“It fought without killing. Deliberately. Your plan was good, but we would not have been able to restrain the creature for the trip back to Bellwood. Nor would it have allowed us to kill it.”
Reynard’s relieved sigh was a quiet one, by necessity – if Jalera wasn’t blaming him, then he was likely safe from reprisals, but it would be stupid to antagonize Marcus or any of the others, and end up drawing further ire and blame.
Even if he might have deserved it.
“So what do we do now?” Marcus asked.
The dark, furrowed expression on his brow wavered for a moment as despair competed with anger.
“For now we rest and heal our bodies,” the diamond-ranker replied simply.
“You mean you’re going to accept its offer?” Marcus asked, staring at the older woman.
“You would do well to learn pragmatism,” she replied, “you show great potential, but you cannot allow emotion to lead your judgment. Enemy or friend, the creature in the pool offers us strength at no cost. We would be fools to refuse, whether we mean to make peace with it, or strike again when our strength is recovered.”
“Will you?” Lyanna asked. “Try again, I mean.”
Jalera gave her a cold stare.
“Uh, well… I’m going to get see if I can get my nose fixed, anyway,” Reynard spoke up, to break the uncomfortable tension and draw the eyes off poor Lyanna.
Safkhet was waiting in the warm water, eyes closed, lying in the pool by the side of her friend.
For a moment he thought she might actually be sleeping – a remarkable show of disregard for her former foes given the circumstances – but she waved to him as he drew near.
To get in he would have to remove his armor of course. It had seemed insignificant as defense against her, yet he felt self-conscious as she watched him undressing, down to his smallclothes. Sadly bare of ears or tail as she might be, she really was remarkably beautiful now all the blood and wounds were gone.
As well as having a presence that made his blood turn to ice, she had also healed frighteningly quickly.
“Thank you for earlier, Reynard.”
The words came just as he was testing the waters with a toe. He froze, then wobbled in place. The stone on which he stood shifted, he and fell forwards.
Plunging into the water on the far side of the pool from Safkhet, the vulpine could hear a little giggle emerging from the girl. As he struggled to right himself, and his feet found the bottom, he overheard the harpy at her side snort with amusement too.
He settled himself seated on a stone, as far from her as possible, yet with the tension diffused he found himself wondering if Saf was really so frightful after all. He could feel the intense ache of her power all around him, but also the gentle throbbing, tingling sensations as water soothed him. All those little scrapes and bruises, all the hurts of a long expedition and a brutal battle, melted away in the warmth.
Safkhet studied him quietly, as if trying to make sense of the underwhelming figure of the vulpine adventurer.
“We’re both grateful, but… can you tell me why you saved us?” the woman asked.
He blushed.
It felt foolish to say so, but he wasn’t entirely certain himself.
“Spose I could say it’s ‘cause yer obviously no mimic – an’ definitely not someone we could beat – but that’s not it. Not really. Guess I… just din’t wanna see any more innocent people get hurt ‘cause of me. I… this expedition’s already gotten a lotta people dead. An’ I din’t wanna see Lyanna suffer any more neither. Owe her enough as it is… least this might make up for a little of it.”
There was quiet once more, only the background sounds of geysers in the distance and the gentle bubbling of the pool to fill the air.
“Try to dip your nose in,” she suggested, “it only heals through direct contact.”
The relief as he did so was blissful; in seconds the burning pain was reduced to little more than a sore itch, and as he let the water enter his nostrils he could feel the split flesh re-knitting.
It wasn’t a pleasant sensation, but it was a positive one. He made sure to hold his nose as straight as possible as the water took effect, lest it heal crooked.
His aunt had gone by ‘Lefty’ for years after a similar accident and a visit to a less than reputable healer.
Sitting up again after a few minutes, he saw that other figures were undressing by the edge of the water. Dolm was among them, one of the first it seemed, given his state of undress. The dark-skinned human was carefully peeling himself out of an undershirt with a grimace, the fabric adhering to a number of patches where the sheen of his toned chest and arms was broken by red, inflamed burns.
Snorting the water from his nostrils, Reynard realized that the archer could look forward to a full recovery. Safkhet’s water had worked wonders on the vulpine. He didn’t even feel particularly drained, just a little sleepy.
“Thank you.”
Their voices spoke the words simultaneously.
“For saving us,” Saf explained.
She squeezed the hand of the woman at her side, and the two shared a glance and a few words.
“Berenike says thanks too. Even if you came here to attack us, we owe you one for what you did. It was really brave of you.”
She couldn’t have imagined how the words hurt him, but her smile faltered as she saw his expression.
“No… no,” he said, shaking his head, “I oughta be thanking you. For helping someone like me, even after all I’ve done…. All we done to you. You coulda just killed the lotta us.”
“Maybe,” she said quietly.
“But then you’d all be dead. Almost thirty people, killed, just so I could get out of a fight the easy way. All those lives… with so much potential, so many hopes and aspirations… so many people who care for them or have cared for them… all destroyed forever, just for the sake of one person….”
There was an eerie, haunted look on her face suddenly, and she shivered, despite the warmth and the hot sun overhead.
“I don’t know what human societies are like, but some things are absolute, Reynard. Like the value of life. Every life. Yours included. Even if you choose to misuse it, your life is unique and irreplaceable.”
The vulpine stared at her.
In his head a conversation was replaying over and over. The same one he’d heard and reheard every hour of every day since it happened.
He could still feel the spearhead in his neck as he spoke those words.
‘Please don’t kill me! I-I’ll tell you!’
“What if… I hadn’t distracted Marcus?” he asked eventually. “If they still had your friend, and wouldn’t stop attacking you? What would you have done?”
Safkhet’s face grew somber, a grave, grim hardness pushing out along the line of her brow.
“I’m not a goddess, Reynard. I’m only human. Like you… well similar to you anyway. I’ll fight to avoid killing, but if I had to choose between people who made themselves my enemy, and my own life or the lives of my friends, then that’s no choice at all.”
She lowered her quiet voice still further, forcing him to lean closer to hear.
“If you hadn’t intervened, I was going to kill Marcus.”
He stared at her quietly.
“That’s why I say thank you, Reynard,” she said, face brightening a little, “I… still have blood on my hands, even if I’ve never killed anyone with them directly. But I don’t want to take that last step, not now and not ever. I don’t want any more lives to end because of me.”
“What about… the blood on your hands already?” he whispered. “What do you do about that?”
Safkhet gave a long, slow sigh.
“I resolved never to do things that way again. To never… let myself take an easy way out, to use people and let them get killed, just because they’re my enemies. And to do whatever I can to make sure no-one else has to die, friend or foe. I don’t know if that’s enough… or if anything can be… but I think I can live with it at least.”
More people were approaching the rim of the pool, and Safkhet fell silent. She dunked her head in the water, washing away the droplets lining her cheeks.
Reynard did the same. As he came up again trails of water ran down Reynard’s face, concealing the tears that he continued to shed.
No-one noticed as the pool started to fill up.