The Five [EDITING]

Chapter Seventeen: Bravery

GEACOB
   "So you're not cutting my arm off?"
   Alie shot me a look that was half a glare and half a smirk of amusement before going back to her stitching. The wound on my arm was deep, but small --- a stab wound. The lucky bastard who had gotten me was dead now so I couldn't even hold a grudge against him.
    "Any other injuries?" She asked, glancing around so she included everyone in the question but all shook their heads. She had already fixed up everyone else. I was the last, except...
   "You're next." I said to her, motioning toward the wound I knew was there, hiding under her black wool.
   She waved it off. "I'll do it afterwards. I'm starving." She said it casually, but glanced at Ritch who was wincing though he hadn't seen the wound. She didn't want him to see it, I realized, because Ritch already blamed himself. Guilt was written all over his face.
   "It's not your fault, Ritch." I told him as Alie wrapped up my arm from wrist to elbow, as if this wound was a long one. "You couldn't have known that you would freeze up like that."
   "I should have." He said, looking at the floor. "I should have said something."
   Alie was quiet a moment. "Perhaps you should have." She said finally. "But if that is the case, than so should have I." She bit her lip, showing how difficult it was to display what she believed to be a weakness. "I was terrified that I was going to freeze as well. I knew there was a chance but instead risked it."
   Ritch looked at her with accusing eyes. "Don't lie. I hate pity."
   "You didn't freeze up in Leafinton." Loryn reminded her, mentioning what Alie had done for her for the first time. "You didn't hesitate at all. You... save me."
   "I didn't freeze." She agreed. "However..." she took a deep breath, then let it all out in a rush. "I went into shock afterwards. Geacob had to sit up with me in a tree for hours until I stopped shaking."
   Loryn looked shocked. "Really? You?"
   "And still, I have nightmares about it. I wake in the night and think I feel blood on my hands. I can feel the warmth and the stickiness of it. I swear that if I were to put it to my mouth, I would taste it, it is so real. I only understand that it had been a dream when I find Geacob's hand and they do not slip over his fingers with blood, but feel that they are instead dry."
   I reached over and took one of her hands now. I'd felt her wake in the night and take my hand, but hadn't realized why.
   She smiled at me briefly and then continued. "So I thought that I would hesitate. I almost did not go up there, but I did. It just so happens that I did not freeze."
   "But I did." Ritch reminded her but looked slightly relieved. "My mother, she had died of the same sickness a couple years before, so when my aunt asked me to.... I knew how bad she was going to get and I agreed but..." He swallowed visibly, "I hit a rib. She said it would be easy, but it wasn't. I had to stab her over and over again and I just got so... so angry with her. I loved her, but in that moment, I hated her for what she'd asked me to do."
   Loryn started to cry suddenly and I thought she was crying because of Ritch's story, but after a few moments, she burst out: "I hate my mother!"
   She shouted it, as if the words had literally burst from her mouth. Then she broke down.
   For a while, she couldn't speak anymore because her sobs were so wretched. These were not the pathetic sobs that I had heard from her often before; this was the cry of someone is so much pain that it came out in in way of sound.
   When Loryn was finally calm, she blushed a deep scarlet as if she hadn't wished that to come out at all --- that was definitely new. When she said nothing, it was Alie who spoke to her in kind, soft words meant only for her ears, regardless of the company they were in.
   "You don't have to say anything, you know, but I think you'll feel better if you let it out. You've been through so much more than any of us on this frightening adventure we are in, and I believe this is something that we often forget." She glanced briefly at Hark, who now slept, curled in a ball as if the pain haunted even his dreams. "So tell us if you wish Loryn, I will listen, and you should know that I, at least, will not judge you."
   Loryn was quiet a while longer, but then she surprised us all by speaking. Speaking only to Alie.
   "I hated you." She whispered. "I hated you, because you were pretty and kind and useful, and people looked at you like you were someone important. I hated you because you were those things, and I wasn't any of them."
   Alie opened her mouth as if to speak but Venny spoke first, his voice not nearly so kind.
   "Then why didn't you make yourself one of those things instead of pissin' us all off?"
   Everyone but Loryn sent him a glare which he winced at and had the intelligence to slam his lips closed again.
   But Loryn's tone never changed. "Because of my mother." A silent tear went down her cheek and she hastily wiped it away. "My whole life, she had called me ugly and fat and stupid. She told me that I shouldn't speak or make any of my own decisions because one day, my husband would be making them for me and until that day, she would make them."
   "Sounds like she was jealous." Ritch said with a frown.
   Loryn let out a cold laugh. "I listened to her. She would pinch my belly in the mirror and tell me to look at the fat I had because I ate too much, and so I wouldn't eat for days until papa would shove food on my plate and I had to eat or he would get angry at mother."
   "As he should have." Venny said, his tone just as angry as before but no longer directed at Loryn. "You shouldn't have had to ever starve yourself."
   "I know that now, but papa got violent sometimes. Not with me!" She said quickly and vehemently, being sure she was very clear on that. "Never with me. Not ever. He would bring me presents and tell me I was beautiful and that he would find a good husband for me. He used to take me out to the beach and show me the caves there, and said that I could go there whenever mother was being foolish and he wouldn't get angry with me, even if I missed a really important ball with the king himself." She wiped her eyes again. "But he was fat." She said this with a said smile filled with love and memory. "He even got stuck in his chair sometimes. So when mother said he called me skinny and beautiful, it was because I wasn't as ugly and fat as he was."
   He face crumpled and she finally let the tears go free again, silent as they were.
   "But I didn't wanted them to fight so I always did what she said and I never complained, not ever. And I never had any friends to tell me that mother was wrong because she would tie my skirts so tightly, I could barely breathe sometimes, I swear, let alone talk and laugh. I was so stupid." She let out a breath. "I was stupid and I hated her, and I wish that I had killed her myself. Or that papa had, a long time ago."
   "No." Alie said firmly, in that voice that made people listen. "You are not stupid."
   "I was---"
   "You listen to me Loryn Rosel," she said in a firm but oddly gentle tone as she scooted forward indelicately and grasped her hand. "It was my parents who showed me that kindness is the only way to go through life. Kindness and loyalty and love. They are the reason I am who I am. This is not me. This is their daughter who turned into a Me as I grew and learned by watching them. Do you think I would have been this way if my mother had treated me the way your mother treated you?" Her voice gentled even further. "Loryn, your hands are so damaged from climbing rocks and wielding that ax that I'm not sure you'll be able to climb another wall without screaming for weeks. You're covered in blood and sweat from working so hard to help protect Rangers of all people. You killed that man who managed to cross the bridge, and you did so only because you took Ritch's important place in the plans when you knew he needed you to. You screamed help in a much better accent than I ever could have, after being brave enough to run into a group of two dozen armed men. And you did all of this, every single bit of it, after dealing with Archrit for two weeks, where most people would curl in a ball and die where they fell.
   "So Loryn, tell me, is that the woman your mother raised you to be? Would she be proud of you?"
   "N-no."
   "Good." She said and gave a sad smile. "Loryn, that girl that I just described sounds like someone who is kind, and useful, and that girl is most definitely someone I would look to for advice. That girl is most definitely important. You hear me? The girl you were before was the girl your mother created, but you, Loryn, are so much stronger than she ever was because you have somehow managed to become your own person, despite all the horror that she and everyone else put you through." She paused a moment, then sat back again, breaking the spell that she'd had on all of us with her quiet, serious words. "I am the girl my parents raised, but it looks like you're starting to figure out who you are all by yourself."
   Loryn smiled at Alie. "I've just had better role models, that's all." She said, then frowned slightly as a thought came to her, tinted with mild horror. "Now I know I'm a different person, because never had I thought I would say that a servant, a ranger boy, a poor bastard," she nudged Ritch playfully now, "and two shipboys were good role models for a Lady." Then another thought came to her and she swiveled to gape at Venny. "That reminds me; how, pray tell, does a shipboy learn to fight like you did out there?"
   At that, we were all laughing and Hark, who had apparently woken up at some point, started in with the dramatics of the story of Venny leaping down from the stone like a bird and tackling a guard thrice his size with nothing but a rock in his hand. The medicine, having done its work, made his pain less and his eyes bright, so his storytelling lightened the mood considerably and had us all grinning from ear to ear between laughs and added comments.
   I looked around the group of us. Seeing Harks dramatic gestures and Harks bashful face even as he grinned, at Loryn and Ritch leaning against each other as they waited for the parts of the story they did not see themselves, at Alie's silver eyes flickering between Hark and Venny with both amusement and second-hand embarrassment. All of us filthy and bloody and covered in weeks of sweat, all of us having stories of our own and all of them so very, very different.
   I couldn't help but think of one of my uncles phrases.
   "Family ain't blood, boy, family is hard times and shared experiences. Those are the family members that you really can't kill or steal from because, by the Gods that listen, they'd find a way to stay with ya anyway. Aye, now that's real family."
   Aye. I thought, looking around at the odd mix. It was indeed.