Page 25 of The Merciless Ones
Safe…
The word pushes through the darkness, as does the sight of those trees. My body’s trembling gradually fades until, finally, I can control my muscles again. When I look up, it’s to find Britta and the others around me, similar expressions of worry on their faces. An attack this powerful is rare, but I know the exact cause: it’s because I’m here, in this place that looks so similar to the one where my nightmares began. Terror rises again, a shrillness scratching up my spine, so I look at those reedy trees and breathe deeply again. Once, twice. This is not Irfut. This is not Irfut.
I am in control, not my mind.
Gradually, the panic fades. And embarrassment rises in its wake.
“I’m all right,” I say, swiftly pulling myself out of Keita’s and Britta’s arms.
Why am I still so weak? I should be past this by now.
Tears clog my throat, and I tighten my cloak around my face, shame deepening as Keita’s arms circle me again. The more I try to pull away, the more his arms tighten. Finally, I give in and sink into their warmth, letting the clean, subtle scent of him wash over me.
“All right, ye,” I hear Britta say to the others. “Back to the wagons.”
They reluctantly shuffle away. Except for one.
“I think she’d like some time alone,” Keita says stiffly.
“Then why are you still here, son of mortals?” Melanis’s voice replies.
I glance up to find her standing in front of the wagon, staring at me with a furrowed brow. She’s still wearing her grandmotherly disguise, but the red luck mask she’s donned is perched on her hair so I can see her bare face, disapproval written across it.
I stiffen. “It’s battle fatigue,” I say defensively. “I was tortured in a cellar for months. Beheaded, dismembered, burned—”
“And then you, what, descended into madness?” She moves closer, seeming unconcerned when Ixa growls in her direction. He’s still in his horse form, but his teeth have sharpened in warning.
Deka! He snarls at her.
Melanis barely spares him a glance. “I burned for centuries. Do you know what that feels like, honoured Nuru?” Even through my haze, I can detect the derision in her voice. “You collapse into insanity, then find your way back, only to collapse again. Decades spent descending, then clawing yourself out. The pain, the humiliation, the anger…”
Her eyes pierce mine. “Hear me, Nuru to our mothers. Everything you experienced – all the pain you think you endured – it was all nothing. Merely the lightest feather’s touch. Multiply that by thousands, millions of times, and then you’ll know what pain truly is. I burned for so long, my skin peeling, fat bubbling. Every time my eyes healed, the flames would rise, and they’d burst again. Sometimes, to be cruel, they’d let me heal for a day. Two. Just so they could recite prayers at me. Then they’d burn me again.”
She pins me with a look. “Burn for a thousand years, Deka. Become so familiar with the odour of your flesh that it is a constant perfume. Know intimately how each part of your body crumbles, then heals. Then you can tell me of foolish things like battle fatigue and torture.”
She storms off into the forest, her wings rustling behind her.
And my anxiety deepens.
As does my shame.
Everyone around me has lost comrades, family – been tortured in the most horrific ways. Belcalis spent years being assaulted and killed in a brothel, and she never loses control the way I do. Yes, she has nightmares, visions that plague her so badly, she spends many nights awake; but by morning she’s fine and just goes about her affairs, same as everyone else.
Why am I the only one who wallows in her memories? Why am I the only one who’s weak?
I look down at my hands – these hands strong enough to kill jatu, deathshrieks, humans, topple an empire. Even they can’t protect me from the darkness of my own thoughts.
“She’s wrong, you know.” I glance up to find Keita, his arms still around me, staring after Melanis, a thoughtful look in those golden eyes. “What you endured in Irfut was not a mere insignificance. Neither was my family’s death, the deaths of the others…”
Keita isn’t the only uruni who’s lost his family. Li and Acalan, Belcalis’s formerly righteously religious uruni, have as well, but they never talk about it. Then again, I’m not as close to them as I am to Keita.
“Everything we experience matters,” he says. “Not one thing outweighs the other. Sometimes, you can’t breathe in certain places. And I –” he inhales heavily, trying to summon the words – “I can’t step foot in the house where my family was murdered.”
I glance up at him. “Keita,” I whisper, my heart breaking. I know how much it costs him to say this, to even utter the words.
Keita’s family was killed by deathshrieks when he was only eight. Mother, father, brothers – all of them gone in the blink of an eye. And they were killed because they built a summer house near the temple of the goddesses. A summer house the former emperor could have easily warned them would be a danger to their lives. Back then, deathshrieks became nearly feral at the sight of humans, the smell of their fear – an instinct the goddesses gifted them with to ensure their survival. The emperor knew this – knew all about the alaki, the deathshrieks, the goddesses. And he just let Keita’s parents die. Plotted their deaths, in fact.
I thought I’d seen wickedness at the hands of the men in my village, but they never even came close to the scope of the former emperor’s crimes.