“My lord—”
“Get out.”
When the door closed behind the physicians, her father knelt by Melia’s bed and lowered his voice. “You’re no good to me weird or dumb. We’re at war and I lead these men, they look up to me. I can’t have weak spots. I can’t allow you to be a burden, a living proof that it’s easy to hurt me. I need you to pull yourself together. Do you understand?”
Melia nodded.
“Say yes.”
Melia tried to obey, but no words came. Her father’s eyes, two burning lumps of coal, bored into her mind, singeing her brain. The fog inside her hissed and evaporated, leaving behind the blood-soaked dust, the dead horse with his belly open, its entrails glistening in the dying light, and then the world went black.
Words abandoned her, and so did her father.
The servants had soon enough given up on her as well. The maids would talk openly about her in her presence, as if she were an object, as if she were deaf.
Only Rovin would come to try and talk to her. “Are you alright?” he would ask, his blushing cheeks revealing he was aware how stupid that question was.
And Melia would blink, keeping her silence. What good was talking? There was nothing she wanted to communicate. There was nothing left inside her, she was filled with gray fog, a cloud of miasma that extinguished all life.
It went on for months, the silence, until one day Melia’s father walked into her chamber, followed by a young woman dressed in gray and dark green with a mass of black curls spilling from under her kerchief.
“If you can make her act normal, you can stay,” he said, “but she hasn’t uttered a word in over two years.”
The young woman nodded. “My lord, may I examine her in private?”
“You may do whatever you think is necessary. I’ve wasted enough time on her already.”
When the door closed behind her father, Melia expected the woman to act like so many physicians, healers, and charlatans before her. She expected to be examined, prodded, pinched. One eager young man had even burned her palm with candle flame in a desperate attempt to make her produce a sound. Some of those people had tried to be friendly, some pleaded or demanded, some were outright cruel.
The newcomer, though, had no instruments, no bags of any kind with her. “My name is Ferisa,” she said. Her face was broad and strong-boned, with eyebrows thick and perfectly arched as if they were two strokes of charcoal. Her hands looked rough, accustomed to hard work, but her clothes were relatively fine.She crossed the room and knelt before Melia, who was sitting in a chair. When their eyes met, the woman—Ferisa—said, “Hello, little death. I could smell you from the other side of the corridor.”
Melia realized the woman wasn’t talking to her at all, wasn’t staring into her eyes, but behind them.
Then the woman started to hum a tune Melia had never heard before, but which nevertheless felt familiar, reverberating in her bones. Pausing only to take a breath, the woman walked to the fireplace and picked up a burning ember with iron tongs.
Now the pain starts, Melia thought.
But instead of burning her with it, the woman placed the ember in a little censer she produced from her pocket. A faint waft of foul-smelling smoke rose up, entwining with the endless hummed tune.
Melia was curious. This was by far the most interesting method she’d encountered. She wondered if the smoke had some healing property, if it would make her dizzy or nauseous.
It seemed that Ferisa had no interest in Melia. She continued to hum, gently swinging the censer so the cloud of smoke engulfed both of them. It tickled Melia’s throat, but apart from that, it did nothing for her. It was a nice show, she thought, but just as useless as the rest.
When the room filled with smoke, the woman laid the censer on the windowsill and knelt before Melia once more.
“Little death, it’s time for you to come out.”
Something moved inside Melia.
“Little death, come, come, this is no place for you.”
Inside Melia’s lungs, something crawled, slow and heavy.
“Little death, I welcome you and honor you in the name of our goddess.”
The thing in Melia’s lungs moved up her windpipe like a giant worm, slimy and cold.
“Come, little death, come.” And then the woman came closer and pressed her mouth to Melia’s, sucking. The thing moved up through Melia’s throat, her mouth, huge and black and cold as the grave. Up and up and up, into the warm cavern of Ferisa’s mouth.
