12.8
The High King had let Jewel be badgered and fawned over in equal measure before he asked her if she finally knew enough to declare their efforts to tame Jaksa’s horrors a ‘success’.
She had thought about it a moment longer and then asked to speak to the ‘product’ alone and for new clothes to be acquired for it. That had disappointed the strange wizard and his obsession with watching Jewel burn things with wyrm flame and requesting to further touch her person (which she refused)
Jewel promised them both that after she was done she would give her decision in the morning.
Whatever uncertainty they harbored for the thing’s loyalty did not extend to any concern about leaving it alone even after Jewel departed.
And then she had been alone with it, deprived of more opportunities to watch her flame render iron, wood, stone, flesh and even stranger substances under the wizard’s fiery scrutiny. Erhard had departed in a violent flash of ringing metal and sparks.
What was the importance of how beeswax burned in wyrmfire raw vs shaped into candles?
Jewel did not know.
However after even a few questions speaking to the corpse of a woman she was already missing Erhard and his earnest if steely faced curiosity.
“How do you feel?”
“Hungry”
“No, I mean how are you?”
“I am here”
“Are you happy?”
“No”
“Are you in pain”
“No”
It could take over a dozen questions to confirm anything, sometimes more! It spoke as little as possible, as if it wanted to keep every word locked up inside itself.
It was such a chore to speak with!
But as she asked Jewel kept finding hints and slivers of it, truths and heartfelt emotions.
Fragments of the woman that had once lived beneath that skin, seen with those eyes, smiled with those lips.
She learned a great many things and yet even as the hours slipped by she felt like she knew far too little. Just a pile of facts, and each of them requiring more litigation then any guild, noble or even an irritated farmer could muster!
The woman’s hair and eyes had not been red before the ritual that made it this, but brown and blue respectively.
She was ‘delighted’ (only barely said with a spark of emotion) by her son’s new found life and looked forward to all she could do to care for him with the full resources of the High King’s palace at her disposal (extracted with fifty different monosyllabic answers).
She was not nursing him before his death or presently. But would make her flesh allow it, although despite Jewel’s protest she then seemed confused that the only thing that would come from trying to squeeze her own teat was blood.
The answer had changed then, if her son needed milk she would find a wet nurse.
The woman’s name had been Franziska Millersdottir and it was embarrassing how long it took Jewel to ask that.
Her boy was Leobwin Franzison (this only took four questions).
She felt no pain or fear anymore.
Franziska’s corpse said as honestly as Jewel could determine that she felt nothing at all but the slight drag of her own hunger.
She did not mind this at all, it simply was, like the color of her hair.
No love, no hate, just the lurking hunger which craved to always eat, to swallow the life back that had been taken from it.
So many questions, every question Jewel could think of to try and tease out the truth of just what Erhard, Mathias and the priests and other god botherers had done to the woman. To try and satisfy her judgment that the woman should or should not be.
A dead voice, speaking with a dead tongue that yet breathed and ate and drank and performed so many acts like life. But shining through like sunlight breaking between cracked walls and stone was the light of the once living woman. Not the person herself as far as Jewel could determine.
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But there was something more than just the corpse and its hunger, something somehow held by sorcery and divine miracle.
And for that she had to know the truth of what was there.
She had to ask until she had an answer.
It was a task that left Jewel feeling exhausted when she finally felt like there was nothing more she could extract from the corpse.
The last thing she had determined was the paradox of the creature itself.
It cared not at all for its own life.
It did not care about anything.
Not even satisfying its hunger. The hunger simply was what it was.
But when in a fit of frustration Jewel presented the possibility that it might be destroyed?
That had prompted an action.
“Will you swear to keep Leobwin safe?”
Jewel stared at the empty thing which had stood there sucking air for long hours with no complaint. No obvious agency at all with its hunger so shackled.
“Why do you ask? You freely admitted you care not for him.”
The thing shifted more than it had for most of the night. It dragged its tongue over its lips, looked up and down Jewel’s coils with a calculating but starving gaze.
“It was my vow, He must live. Or I will perish and burn.”
Jewel glared at the thing that refused to make this problem simple for her.
“You would already be perished, You don’t even mind if you do, What does that matter to you?”
And there was a proper pause there.
It almost seemed to freeze, but the roil of the presence of divine and sorcerous workings showed something was happening within it.
“I cannot trust the High King Mathias to Protect little Leobwin. I gave my life to Asherah to save my son, But the High King would use his life to test my loyalty.”
Every word was flat, not touched by that intermittent spirit of the dead woman whose corpse still stood before Jewel.
It settled its roaming gaze to face Jewel, the hunger of its eyes, of its pores, of every part of it gnashing at the surface. The twisting sorcery and divinity in its flesh a tumult that seemed to strain at every fiber of its hunger.
“But you would have ended me before I could harm Leobwin. You were horrified by the king, by his wizard and his words.”
The thing which should have been nothing but an empty pit of hunger, driven only to devour. Which sucked at the air to strip its vitality. The thing that felt like a terrible black pit of an ornament wrapped in a filigree of sorcery and divine decree before her?
It begged for a child’s life just because that had been part of the vow used to create it.
The dying wish of the woman it had been.
Jewel said the only thing she could.
“I would keep him safe if I destroyed you.”
And like that it bowed its head, it kneeled, bits of its flesh and that black pit of a heart writhed.
The hunger did not precisely want to surrender.
Jewel could taste that emptiness lashing at any hint of giving in.
But it was balanced by the miracles within it.
They were like that for some time, Jewel was not sure for how long but the candles in the room had melted further than the low place they had reached when she gave her promise.
In time the silence between them was broken by the thing speaking.
“If you are not going to end me, I need to depart. Leobwin will miss his mother if he wakes early. I will need to play with him and teach him and tell him stories and feed him today. And the days after. Unless you destroy me.”
Jewel stared for a moment before finally responding.
“Go then, you have duties to your son.”
And then it was gone, near silent, running into the dark hallways like a shadow of a bird in flight.
Jewel ached as she uncurled herself from the tight confines of the chamber. Every one of her six limbs aching as she made her way through the darkness of the dead night.
A glance to the stars showing she would have far too few hours of sleep before the trials of the next morning came. But she would take what sleep could be stolen from this awful night. The way was obvious, she could smell her own passing and had been given a tour once of the grounds.
She was silent and lifted by wyrmflame when she finally found her family’s sleeping chamber.
She was as gentle and quiet as she could be slipping into the room and finding space around her husband and spawn in the dark of their bedroom. Settling as slowly and carefully as possible into the cushions.
Breathing deeply and slowly.
Matching her inner turmoil with the already restful dreaming of ‘Gem’.
The evened breathing of her husband.
What an awful day.
What a terrible night.
But Jewel could feel something in her flame unfettered and free.
She had Mathias’ answer regarding the poor woman and whatever terrible working of sorcery and the divines had been used to make her into that thing.
A part of her hoped he would dislike her judgment.
But as she drifted into dreams her lips and brows made a frown.
He probably would not.