All's Fair in Revenge

Chapter 58: The Wake

Whispers of smoke. Flecks of ash cradled on a breeze. Charred logs. Dry, bitter powder cakes my tongue. Soot squelches between gnashing teeth. My lungs sting and my eyes burn. A melted strand lifts off my forehead and I watch it pass back and forth over my nose like a pendulum in soft, heavy blinks. Rolling my eyes around behind their lids clears some of the fogginess away, but not enough. My mind makes shapes out of blurs ascribing memory or fantasies to the undecipherable. Blobs who look too much like my mother knee deep in bodies or Brix pressing two fingers against necks. At the edge of my foggy vision, I hallucinate fifteen or so Heerth warriors starring up at me, strange apprehension set into their jaws. If I'm to begin imagining things now, why must they be such cruel apparitions? A pool of crystal-clear water would be nicer. Kinder still.

The world blinks, or maybe I do. It comes in brief flashes like lightning in the thick of night. At some point, seconds or hours later, a lever gives and every inch of me feels everything all at once. Waist down I smolder, black ash covering every inch of me. The salty breeze arrives in gusts this time like a whip lashing exposed muscle. I groan beneath its cuts. The fire hadn't yet reached my bound wrists, but it ate the rope at my feet. I slip until I sit on my heels, a crumbled pile of mutilation.

I scream, "Help," but the sound is nothing but rasp. I try again. My head merely bobs. Times passes. Someone climbs the charred wood pile and saws through the remaining rope. My body collapses onto the platform seconds before my soul catches up in a jarring slip in and out of reality. The smell of burnt wood and skin and hair gathers around me in tendrils of heat. A crack like thunder sounds from underneath and soon the platform is crashing toward the ground. I hit my saviors like a soundless toasted boulder.

Somehow, I survive the fall because moments later, I'm laid in sooted dirt as someone's knees. She smells like sunlight and her hands rove me with the tenderness of a grandmother. They start with my throat and lungs. I expect tonics. I expect salves. These are humans after all. I'm healed instead.

Between fervent blinks I see Ma'ma hunched above me, her silver hair hanging in ribbons over my chest. Tolly is with her, holding me still, though I can't feel my arms, so I know not why.

"Why isn't she healing on her own?" Ma'ma asks Tolly as if she's supposed to know. The Heerth warrior shrugs. Ma'ma rests her hands on my thighs, light curses slipping between pursed lips.

"Liv?" I ask in groans. "Where's Liv?"

Sybil looks from me to Tolly then says to me, "Rest, dotir." I open to argue. Demands rise to my lips. Before I'm given the chance a piece of fabric covers my face. Tolly holds fast my wrists. I gasp, panic even, but an essence of sweet tartness enters with my breath. I wish everything had faded to black, to emptiness and nothing. But black it was not. Instead, I have the pleasure of the searing, scorching nightmare of something I can only describe as blistering, bright red.