Midnight Moon

Chapter 33 - Ghosts

"Ruki, please!"

Tia screwed her eyes closed, banishing the echoes of her dream and refusing to dwell on spectres. She could not afford her mind drifting far away, to where dusky skies and dusky eyes had once waited for her. She knew they waited no longer.

She focused instead on Veanna. Though her cheeks had regained some colour, the girl was still eerily ashen. Even the fairest Outlanders Tia had known, were browned by the sun, yet Veanna was as pale as the moon.

Tia's chest twisted in a way it had not in years. She had been wilfully numb since she left her tribe, since they left her, but now Veanna was her mission, her drive. And she was dying. Losing this last chance for redemption in her crimes against the gods would break her spirit.

Tia turned away abruptly and fished through her satchel. She pulled out a vial of black ink and a needle, its point shining a warning in the candlelight. She set her jaw, knowing the pain that was to come but also knowing she deserved it.

As far as she had been able to tell, she and Neyerith had each been forced to kill one opponent at the temple. Along with the bandits they fought a few weeks earlier, that made two deaths she had yet to mark on her skin. Her vine tattoos were more than a tradition, more than a symbol: they were the price she wore for taking a life. Her soul was scarred, and her skin would be likewise marred by the excruciating rhythm of the needle - she would feel the pain as punishment for the people whose future days she robbed.

Tia swallowed as she prepared to add two more vines to her tattoo. A thought nagged at her, the question of whether those she had felled were damning her from the ground - if indeed their remains lay in the earth. The bandit had gone up in flames, the ashes caught and scattered by the wind. Perhaps the corpses of the Order at least had been left in the ruins of the temple to crumble over time among the stones, returning to the ground on which they had lived.

Dissonance stirred in her stomach, bemused as ever by the blindness of these Eastfolk in creating pyres rather than graves. They looked to the skies for their dead, without realising that life and death were in the earth beneath their feet.

As she felt the first sting of the needle, Calu's steady breaths cut off with a gasp as he started awake. Many needle pricks later, he sat up, rubbing his eyes and pushing tangled curls from his face. He turned on the bed, blinking slowly as his eyes tracked around the shadowy room, his gaze lingering on Neyerith's empty chair and on Tia before settling on Veanna.

"Has she moved at all?" Calu whispered, his voice raspy from sleep.

"Her condition has not changed." Tia did not need to see his face to know that hope and worry warred for control of his expression; those same emotions kept her from looking at Veanna again to confirm whether her words were true.

He nodded and leaned forward a fraction as though to check Veanna's wellbeing himself, but seemed to share Tia's reticence to have his fears rather than his wishes affirmed and sat back. "Where's Neyerith?"

"He went to the bar." Tia didn't bother to keep the disapproval out of her voice.

Calu shifted, frowning. "How long has he been gone? Is it nearly morning?"

She shook her head without lifting her gaze. "You have only been asleep a few hours, and he left a short time ago." But I wish he would come back. Troublesome and tiring as he could be, she did not want their navigator running off in the middle of the night, jeopardising their safety and his own. He was selfish, derogatory, and concealed cowardice behind a loud voice and a handsome face, but his absence felt akin to being unable to reach her sword.

"Is it true that Outlander tattoos show your fighting prowess?" Calu blurted.

Tia almost rolled her eyes at his desperation to fill the silence. But she glanced up and saw fear in the wideness of his eyes, worry in the fidgeting of his fingers, guilt in the tremor of his lips. She could afford to be his distraction for a few moments. "That depends on your view. The tattoos record deaths by your hand; some may say a better fighter can win without killing. Most believe that taking too many lives will cause the gods to punish you."