Llew continued to come in and out of consciousness, the passing of time as vague as any of her thoughts. It felt as if her life had become about sleeping, bathing, and barely functioning in a drug-addled semi-consciousness. She slept. She woke. She slept again.

A week after the attack, her medication was reduced and she began to get out of bed for short walks around her room, supported by Jonas, his hands always gloved in leather.

Her belly ached, firing sharp pains with nearly every step in her efforts to get out of bed, but she was sick of being bedridden. She had to move.

All too often, her body ached for another reason. That strange love that had appeared out of nowhere no longer had a direction and she didn’t know what to do with it. As the drug haze wore off, the sense of loss moved in and settled. Llew, the strong, independent child of Cheer, regularly turned into a blubbering mess wrapped in arms unable to give any real comfort through leather and cotton.

They spoke little about what had happened. Jonas hardly talked at all. Llew guessed his thoughts were consumed with all that he’d learned in those days. He’d looked up to Aris all his life – his mentor, his Captain, his father figure – and Aris had kept possibly the biggest secret ever from him: that he was something more. If that wasn’t bad enough, Hisham’s silence about Jonas’s son certainly was.

Betrayed by the those he trusted most; Llew had some sense of how he must have felt. She used to think her parents had betrayed her, and her supposed friend Kynas certainly had.

Cadyn came by almost daily, growing more agitated. Once, when Llew was emerging from a sleep, she heard the captain urge Jonas to leave her, head for Turhmos and bring back Cadyn’s nephew.

After that conversation, Jonas, it seemed, was always there, curled up on the floor by her bed, propped off the chair, or in his own cot under the window. She hadn’t heard Cadyn make a threat against her, but the clues were there to make her wonder.

When Anya walked into Llew’s room, Llew had to blink and look again. Anya was really there.

Anya gave her a tight-lipped smile, her eyes sparkling. Then the smile turned down and she came to Llew’s bed.

“Oh, Llew. It’s so good to see you.” Anya bent to kiss Llew on the cheek.

“Don’t. I’ll burn you.”

Anya stopped, only an inch separating them, then pulled back and sat in the chair by the bed. Seemingly not quite sure what to do with her hands, she rested them on the edge of the mattress.

“How are you?” she asked.

“Better,” Llew said honestly.

“Do you need anything? Have you eaten?”

Llew smiled. “They’re looking after me.” She was eating and drinking, but only small amounts, and only when the hunger or thirst got too much. The problem with things that went in was that they had to come out, and everything hurt.

“And so they should.” Anya put on a stern air briefly before softening to a friendly smile again, though her pity wasn’t far from the surface.

For the first time since she’d met her, Llew felt an awkwardness in Anya’s presence. They both knew why Anya had come all this way, but neither of them knew how to talk about it.

Jonas, who had been asleep in his cot, stirred. “Anya?”

“Hey.” Anya waved.

Jonas rid himself of his bedding and came across the small room, arms spread in a clear suggestion of a hug. He wore only his drawers.

“Oh.” Anya blushed. Then she composed herself and stood to accept the greeting, even giving a tentative hug in return.

“It is so good to see you.” Jonas pulled Anya into a firm embrace and Llew felt the sting of jealousy.

“You, too,” Anya croaked out, unable to catch a breath. She patted his bare back.

Jonas released her and studied her a moment, as if he, too, had to make certain she really was there.

“Well, I’ll leave you two girls to …” He turned and pulled on his trousers, leaving the room, half-dressed and without finishing the sentence.

Anya brushed herself off. “Um. Right.” She sat back by Llew. “I’m so sorry, Llew.” She started to reach for Llew’s hand, stopped, and returned her own hand to the mattress. “So sorry.”

More thin smiles passed between them. Anya’s gaze shifted to the head of Llew’s bed, where the locket she’d had rushed to her in Brurun hung from a hook in the wall.

She looked down, her fingers fidgeting. “I’m sorry I couldn’t give a clearer warning. I didn’t really know what he had planned, and I had to fit it on such a tiny note. When I hadn’t heard anything from you, I’d hoped you’d run with Jonas. But I guess I should’ve known. If you’d got away, Gaemil would have heard something.”

“I never got to read it.”

Anya looked up. “What?”

“There was never a chance to look without Aris or Karlani seeing, and I figured you didn’t want them to see. I tried to be vigilant, Anya. But it’s so hard when everywhere I turn, I’m surrounded by hate.”

Again, several moments of silence passed between them. The easy openness was shattered; for the time being, anyway.

“All the books we were reading … They’re gone. Burned.” Anya took a deep breath, like she was suppressing an outburst. “The library smelled terrible. Actually, I quite liked the smell, but I suppose I shouldn’t, should I?” She took a moment to ponder that. “No,” she said quietly. “I knew it was Aris. And I knew he was planning something. I sent a message to Quaver, too, but clearly that achieved nothing.”

Anya fumed silently for a few more moments. Llew didn’t have an answer. They’d barely been inside the barracks before Aris turned on them. Who knew what Anya could have hoped to achieve from Rakun?

“I planted my Ajnai seed,” Anya said after a while. “Goodness, they grow fast. You should see it. It’s already practically a full-sized tree. It’s beautiful.”

“That’s great.”

“And, while I thought nothing of it at the time, it burst into seed days before I got Jonas’s message. Almost like it knew. So, I brought some with me. I know Quaver destroyed all the Ajnais they found, but surely times are changing. I mean, you and Jonas. And Aris. Whatever the books say, there’s something going on and the Ajnais are part of that. As were your babies.”

Something dropped in Llew’s stomach, and she almost forgot to breathe.

Anya lifted a hand to grab Llew’s, offer her comfort, but remembered in time that Llew was still injured and withdrew.

“Maybe you should plant one for them. It would be a fitting memorial, don’t you think? It would be nice, wouldn’t it? To give them a proper funeral?”

Llew opened her mouth to speak but found she couldn’t shape that word: babies. Anya looked back, her expression pained, mirroring Llew, though she clearly didn’t know why. Llew changed tack. “Them?”

“Oh!” Anya’s fingertips went to her lips. “You didn’t know? Hisham briefed me on my way in, so I thought …” She slumped, full of sorrow. “I thought you knew.”

The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

“Them?” Llew repeated. She’d been mourning the loss of one child already. Three weeks had now passed, and she hadn’t even known about another. Surely, she should have. Shouldn’t she have felt something, known something?

“I thought Jonas would have told you. I’m sure he wouldn’t have forgotten. He probably didn’t want to upset you. And here I come along …” Anya stopped.

“I needed to know.”

“Yes, of course. But maybe not from me.”

“Tell me.”

Anya inhaled and shook her head one way, then relented.

“Aris killed one,” Anya continued, her eyes boring into Llew, seeking signs she’d said too much, but Llew wanted to hear. “There was a second, but the doctor said you wouldn’t be able to carry it safely. There was no way you could heal and grow a baby at the same time. I’m so sorry, Llew.”

Aris had only killed one of her babies. And the other? The other had died because she was too broken to save it. She rolled over to face the wall, risking the pain to curl in on herself.

“Apparently, the doctor said we were lucky to still have you as it was,” Anya murmured. “Well, not in those words …” Anya let her voice fade away and rested a hand on Llew’s shoulder while sobs shook her.

“What’s going on?” Jonas asked from the doorway.

Llew rolled to her back, wiping her tears away with the back of her forearm.

“I told her. There were two,” Anya said over her shoulder. She turned back to Llew and squeezed her shoulder.

Jonas crossed the room to Llew’s bed. “I’m sorry, Llew. I was gonna tell you.” He crouched, grabbed some loose sheet, and clasped Llew’s hand.

“See?” Anya smiled.

“There was never a right time. I dunno—” Jonas shrugged, and his face pinched against so many unspoken words. “—I guess there’s never gonna be a right time. I guess … I just want you to get better.”

Llew didn’t know what to say. Some part of her wanted to be angry at Jonas. But how could she be? All she could do was mourn anew, for the child she hadn’t known needed her tears. Her vision wobbled, and Jonas leaned in, placing one arm over her, and resting his head on her shoulder.

“I’ll um …” Anya began, and then she slipped from the room, leaving the couple to grieve.

----------------------------------------

“Oh, this is ridiculous!” Anya threw her pen down, sending flecks of ink flying out from the fountain tip, decorating the pages splayed before her. The pen rolled, settling in the spine. She sneaked a look over her shoulder, but there was no one to bear witness to her defacing of a sacred tome. Sacred to someone. Completely useless to Anya. Still, she tried to blot up the ink drops as best she could with her handkerchief and quietly commended herself for choosing to conduct her research in the privacy of her room. This hadn’t been her first outburst, and she couldn’t have forgiven herself for breaking the sanctity of silence within the military base’s library, no matter how underutilized. So, it seemed, she had made a very smart decision. Smart to study where her outbursts wouldn’t offend, perhaps. Less so to be attempting to make sense of the volume before her.

It wasn’t even written in Rilish. While a smattering of words seemed familiar enough for her to make some sense of them, the sentence structures and frequency of completely unfamiliar words made it impossible to piece any real information together. At least the words Aenuk and Karan seemed to have been conserved across languages, and another word, Imeniss, appeared alongside them enough to hint that it might be the language’s word for Immortal. This assumption did little to help her understand what any of it meant, though.

Of the few books Gaemil had managed to procure since Aris’s burning of his own collection, this was the only one that seemed to hint at a recorded history different from that taught within Quaver, Brurun, or Aghacia – the little island across a narrow sea that had been Anya’s home until recently. She wished she could access Turhmos’s libraries. She was almost certain they had a different perspective, but they hadn’t been forthcoming before Anya had had to dash to Quaver to ensure her friend was okay and more than merely alive. And so, all she really had, was a book full of gobbledygook. And pictures.

Something told her that the simple fact that she couldn’t read this one meant that it contained exactly the information she needed. She narrowed her eyes at the text, cursing it silently.

“Eldemaire.”

Anya nearly leapt from her seat.

“Sorry.” Gaemil stepped up behind her, placing his hands on her shoulders. He squeezed the balls of his hands against her shoulder blades, giving her a slight tingle, but also inviting her to relax into his touch as he leaned forward to give her a light kiss on the cheek. Almost scandalous, but no one else was there to see. “I didn’t mean to sneak up on you.”

“Eldemaire?” Anya fought against a faint but growing desire for more unseemly behaviors. Llew was in more need than ever for her to find answers. And she could wait. One day she would marry Gaemil and none of this carry on would raise an eyebrow. Well, not entirely true. There were always some eyebrows just looking for an excuse.

“The language of Eldem,” Gaemil supplied, keeping his hands in place, though his touch lightened. Absolutely platonic.

“Oh. Yes, of course.” It made sense he would know the language of the book’s country of origin. Her brief excitement that he might read it evaporated.

“Any luck?” Gaemil grabbed another chair and sat down beside her.

“Well … no.” Anya half stood, gripping her chair’s arm rests to turn it to face him. “At first Llew and I were trying to find something that might help her learn how to control her power, but ever since this business with Aris, I feel there is so much we don’t understand. We’ve made this assumption that he’s Immortal, but even that doesn’t make complete sense. I mean, how could he keep that kind of secret?”

Gaemil smiled warmly. “You forget what little attention people pay one another.”

“Really? You think people just never asked?”

“I haven’t, and I’ve known him, what? Twenty years?” Gaemil splayed his hands in an exaggerated shrug. “I guess it helps he’s already of an age where appearance isn’t expected to change much. And goes to show people don’t make a habit of looking past their own noses, no?”

Anya gave a short giggle. “No, I suppose we don’t at that.” She returned her attention to the book, satisfied enough for now. “Alright, then. My next question is: why does this book keep referring to the Aenuks and Kara alongside the Immortals, when those variants of the races didn’t exist until after the Immortals were destroyed?”

“Hmm. I suppose we also need to ask if the terms Syaenuk and Syakaran would have been used if there weren’t the stronger and diminished races to distinguish between.” Gaemil pursed his lips. “Maybe what we call Syakaran was simply known as Karan a thousand years ago.”

“Or …” Anya flipped through the book, looking for an image she’d glimpsed earlier. Somewhere past halfway through the book she found it. A half-page woodcut showed two people standing by a tree. One person had one hand on the tree and the other wrapped around the wrist of the other. Around the hand gripping the wrist were clear symbolic bolts of lightning. Magic.

Anya had spoken to the guards in Llew’s cell the night of the attack to find out everything she could about what had happened, and they had described lightning in blue and purple zigzagging from Llew’s belly, slithering up the knife and disappearing into Aris’s skin. Magic.

“That tree must be significant, which makes me think it’s an Ajnai. And we know Aenuks have a special relationship with Ajnais, which makes me think this person is Aenuk.” She pointed to the figure with a hand touching the tree. “What if a regular Aenuk took power from an Immortal, and became a Syaenuk?” She turned to Gaemil. Then hefted a disappointed sigh. “But that doesn’t explain the Syakara.”

Her hand brushed the page, looping it in a soft fold, and let it fall, showing the next page.

“And it doesn’t explain Aris.” She looked down at the page now displayed. “Oh! What is that? Ew.” She made a face.

Gaemil made a strange noise in the back of his throat.

Taking up one whole page of the book, a woodcut depicted what Anya could only describe as a person exploding. A pair of legs were where they should have been, as was an arm holding a knife buried in another person. But the rest of the … Well, Anya could only assume it was the Aenuk from the previous page, the rest of whom seemed to be flying about the page. “How did that happen?”

“Well, I guess, um.” Gaemil shifted to the edge of his chair, and studied the image, his brow deeply furrowed. “I guess the power contained within an Immortal is quite immense.”

They looked at each other. Gaemil looked as disturbed as Anya felt.

Anya peered at the image again. There was nothing to suggest anything special about each of the people – or bits of people – shown, but the words Aenuk and Imeniss both appeared in the caption. She reminded herself that Llew, Jonas and Aris all looked like normal people. Her mind was making unpleasant connections.

“So, what it’s saying is that if Llew ever found herself with the opportunity to reclaim Aris’s powers and did so, then …” Boom. She may have been able to stop herself saying it aloud, but the word was so clear in her mind, along with the image of Llew being blown to pieces.

“What if it was a Syaenuk, rather than an Aenuk?” Gaemil asked.

Anya turned to him; her mouth slightly agape. He made a good point. If the Sy versions of the races hadn’t existed in the times this book discussed, then it would never have posed that question.

She clamped her mouth shut and turned the page. So many words she couldn’t draw meaning from. She turned another page. Another full-page wood-cut illustration showed the tree again, this time with the lightning appearing to have an outward motion, leaping out at two figures. One was of a running man, laden with spear and shield. Doubled, no, tripled lines along the figure’s shins seemed to indicate speed. At least, that was how Anya interpreted it. The other figure knelt by yet another person, prone. The healer. But nothing to prove superior healing.

She scanned the caption, finding the words Aenuksi and Karansi. Syaenuk and Syakaran.

Somehow, the powers of an Immortal had been absorbed through an Aenuk, into an Ajnai tree, then spurted back out into another Aenuk and a Karan, creating the augmented versions of those races. But the Aenuk conduit who first stole the Immortal’s powers had been destroyed in the process. As a method of subduing Aris, Anya thought it stunk.