I rested back in my mossy branches and pondered this. She wanted me to awaken. Mother Earth wanted me to claim life. “I thought the sacrifice was my life.”
Was a hand not enough? Also, you spared life. Yours can be spared. If you value it.
I stared down at my tattooed hand, knowing it only belonged to me now in this half-life. “I awaken and the pain will be unfathomable. It could break me. And I will lack a left hand. I will have to live as a one-handed woman.”
This be true.
“It could be… hard. It could be a harder life.”
But you would live.
“But I would live.” I closed my eyes. “I claim the rest of my days, those the fates originally allotted to me. I claim life. My life and all that it is. It is a worthy life.”
I opened my eyes.
103. Pain
I was laying in an ornate bed on a higher level of the keep in a lavish room that was lit by the white light of a stormy morning sky. The light came in via a balcony carved into the rough rock. Next to the opening, rolls of sealed animal skin were stacked. I guessed they were secured across the opening in inclement weather. And then my mind’s observations came to a halt as physical pain flooded through me and I looked down at my left arm, no longer ending in a hand but in a bandage.
I was back in my body.
A wail surged up my throat, but my mouth was too dry and my throat was too raw and it came out in a mournful, hiccuping moan instead.
Jerking to life in a chair on the left side of my bed, Alric sat up, eyes wide and blinking, his brain and body coming to terms with waking. “Edith,” he whispered and sort of fell out of the chair onto the bed, sitting on it and leaning towards me, one hand supporting him, the other cradling my cheek.
“It hurts,” I groaned, panic rising in me at the anguish and the fact that I now had but one hand. “Oh my gods, ithurts, Alric!” I ground the back of my head into the pillow beneath it, as if to create any other sensation than the throbbing at my stump.
He stumbled to a standing position, calling out towards a door, “She is awake! She is in pain.” Then he returned to me, tears in his eyes. “Gods, Edith. I cannot— Thank the goddess.” And his right hand covered his mouth.
“I thought I was dead,” I bleated, tearful and trepidatious, rolling my head away from him sitting on my left side, but keeping my eyes on his face, refusing to look back down my arm.
He nodded, too choked to speak.
“How— how long have I been asleep?” My eyes kept fluttering closed because of the pain, but opening to see his beloved face.
Alric reached across my body to take my right hand in his left one and held it over my stomach, careful to avoid bumping the bandaged arm on my other side. He leaned in, lifting it to his mouth to kiss. “I do not know,” he said, a strangle in his words. “Thatcher made me bathe yesterday. He said you would not want to wake up to an unwashed man. I think you have been unconscious for nearly six days.”
I felt my brow crease. “I feel clean myself. Did someone bathe me?”
He bent his forehead to the back of my remaining hand. “Helena did. And her daughter and Mischa. With towels and sea sponges. Every day. And they put you in a fresh shift. They would not let me help.”
“She is, as always, a saint. And to me in particular. All three of them.”
He kissed my hand again. “She washed your hair yesterday. I think it was yesterday.”
Sighing, I looked up above at the rock ceiling, a cracked mural done by an artist less skilled than my friend, winters ago, depicting a blue-scaled sea serpent wending its way through the Tintarian sea. The memory of my magic returned. “Did you— did you see the drakes?”
He swallowed and looked up. “I looked over my shoulder but once, because I could not bear to look away from you. I will never forget the sight of such magic, Edith. Never. What you did—”
I coughed over his words, my throat so sore, as if I had truly breathed fire like a drake. My lips and eyes were dry. The rest of my body felt rather dead below the neck, except for my left shoulder and arm. I smiled, his face blurring before me with my tears. “Do you think they have something? For the pain?”
He lurched up and strode towards the door, slamming it behind him, shouting. Alric returned quickly with Prince Peregrine and two men dressed in the keep staff black, both of them with full leather aprons, one of them carrying a crate.
“Lady,” said the prince, coming to stand next to where Alric had returned to sit at my side, reclaiming my right hand in his. “You are the savior of Tintar. There are no words—”
“She is in pain, your highness,” my husband interrupted his prince.
“Forgive me,” the man said with a frown on his handsome face.
