Page 14 of Triadic

"Am I dying?" I asked, my voice gnarled and sounding foreign to my ears. "After all this, I'm going to die anyway?"

Someone patted my knee, and I blinked my eyes open to find Marit kneeling at my feet, his face surprisingly open and hopeful. "Nein, Peter. Anything but. You're almost healed."

"Wh-what?" I stammered. How could I be getting better when I was still so sick?

Warm armsgently encircled me, and I realized Corbi was sitting next to me on the bed, both supporting my weight and giving me a hug. It felt like I was always in one of the pair's arms, as they both had stayed so close to me despite my violent illness, even though they'd explained it was a mechanism through which they could use their life force to balance mine and aid healing. Still, this level of comfort had spoiled me, and I didn't want it to end.

"Look here on the table," said Corbi, pointing to two bowls that held red berries. They looked nearly identical.

Corbi pointed to the bowl on the left. "These are lingonberries."

"Oh god," I uttered in dread.

Then he pointed to the bowl on the right. "And these are poison."

Marit picked one up and handed it to me. I held it in my lap and examined it: yes, lingonberries looked exactly like this, with their small red luscious berries and the prickly green leaves. I loved taking a small twig full of them and dipping the whole thing in my mouth, then pulling on the twig so all the berries came loose, and my tongue embraced the tart goodness.

Then on to the second bowl, and indeed there were the slightest differences in the shapes of the leaves and the type of thorns on the stems, even the veiny way the translucent skin of the berries shone in direct light.

"I poisoned myself," I concluded, my eyes burning with tears of shame.

"It's an easy mistake to make," said Corbi gently. "Mother Nature favors the trickster plants just as much as the others."

My stomach ached. I was so sick of vomiting and convulsing, beyond tired and weary. Everything hurt. "Thank you for helping me. I'm sorry I've been such a mess."

"You don't need to thank us," said Corbi. "Your fever broke yesterday. I'm going to take you off the purging medicine and see whether the fever comes back. For now, just rest. Let everything else be for now."

"Warte,wait," said Marit, his brows furrowing. "I have a question."

Corbi all but growled. The sound was so uncharacteristic from his healing demeanor that it caught my attention.

"Is everything all right?" I asked.

"We heard some of what you told Ceridor—the bard—about your life back at your home village," said Marit, his features pinched and irritated. "Is it true your boyfriend cheated on you and impregnated some poor girl?"

"Yusef, yes," I said. "We weren't boyfriends, I guess. Everything we did was secret. I couldn't tell my parents or anyone that I had no attraction to girls. Everyone was convinced that proper Christianity meant that it just couldn't be so. Yet I was so desperate for affection that I was letting Yusef fuck me in the woods for years and never asked anything from him."

I wasn't proud of that. When I thought back to that time, my mental and emotional state was not great. The cold judgment ofmy parents and everyone in town whenever someone stepped the least bit out of line made it very clear I could never be honest or tell my secret.

Corbi made that growling sound again. "We don't like this Yusef."

"No," Marit confirmed, his tone low and dangerous. "We don't like him at all. We'd better not ever meet him."

Their anger at someone who had hurt me struck me as strange, and yet the fact that such protection felt so alien drove home how poorly I'd been treated by people who should have been interested in protecting me. I remembered thinking about that during my long days in the forest.

"You monks surely have taken a vow of nonviolence?" I challenged.

Corbi shook with mirth, and Marit barked a laugh, then explained. "Hardly. Diana Monastery has been in operation since the last European dark age, two thousand years ago, in the 400s. Our magical system requires physical fitness to be effective. We've been known to pivot from calisthenics to outright warrior monks when times are hard enough. These days we only do basic self-defense training, but after Ceridor's mugging, I think it's time for that pivot, or at least for monastery leadership to consider it."

I blinked at him in confusion. He lifted his shirt and tightened his muscles for me to see. I laughed and then yelped in pain as my stomach protested.

"Point taken," I said. "If my body recovers, I want to train under you."

"Does that mean you want to stay here after you recover?" asked Corbi.

I nodded. "I told my story, of Yusef and Genevieve and everyone, to Schneewittchen, the little dog who followed me around. Just saying it out loud helped me to realize how bad things were back home, and how I ultimately don't regret leaving and trying to start over. The…disembodied people who helped me offered to take care of her. They explained she wasn't a dog in the physical plane, but some kind of magical puppy who had once been a real dog."

I had nothing and no one left to go back to. At least here, I already had two friends.