"If You Won't, Learn to Run..."
Jun. 4th, 2007 11:59 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
psalm_onethirtyoneSo. Zarafic. Spoilers for Beggar Queen.
Title: Heart Word
Characters/Pairings: Strange, loose Zara/Florian.
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: People not dying when they should, gratuitous torture, strange dialogue, and the stealing of Kali's backstory for Rina, which only makes a cameo appearance anyway.
Notes: For Manon, who was horrible and made me write it.
Heart Word
Darkness.
She stood, staggering, and leaned herself against a rough wall; there was dirt dampness against her cheek, grimy and breathing cold. Her stomach ached and coiled with sickness. Somewhere off a bit someone was speaking, in a low, hurried voice.
"...I'd know her anywhere, Florian's second in command. We fought together once, back during the war. She'd be worth asking questions."
"That is good information." A second voice, accented.
"Yes, it is," eagerly. "It's worth something."
"You want your freedom?" Scornful.
"You wouldn't have known otherwise. You've got Firedrake. You can get something out of her--"
The dull sound of a musket hitting someone. A groan. She tightened her jaw as the sickness pushed upwards, and tried to make sense of what she'd heard. What she remembered before this was-- they hadn't killed her. The soldier who'd bayoneted her hadn't killed her. Twice he stabbed her, and then someone from the other side had struck her in the head with his gun. She bit at the sickness again. She was alive.
Before she had time to think further, someone took her arm roughly and pulled her upright.
"You. Girl. What is your name?" It was the accented voice.
She spat.
"Firedrake, eh? Eh?" Someone shook her. "That is your name?"
"Don't know what you're talkin' about," she said, and then the sickness escaped her, like an upwards wave. In the darkness she heard the accented voice say,--
"Pig manners. To be expected of Westmark pigs." It laughed with a bitter contempt. "Come, we will see what you know of Master Florian. Come, girl." She was jerked along, down a passage that smelled of dead things, of sickness, and she understood now where she was, she'd been taken to the Carolia, and as light shone at the end of the passage she saw the rough dirt and stone walls, the thick doors of cells. There was a dull ache in her body from the bayonets, and an ache in her head where she'd been struck. The voice that had hold of her belonged to a soldier, resplendent in red, who at last pushed her into a somewhat cleaner room where an officer sat reading a sheaf of papers. His eyes were flat with boredom. The soldier rapped with his musket on the floor and stood at attention, forcing her downwards into a crooked semblance of a bow.
The officer raised his head and broke into a rapid foreign tongue, gesturing at her. She hardly noticed.
(They'dcaughtherthey'dcaughther it didn't do any good, all her jeering and biting and yelling, they were supposed to kill her but they'd caught her and she'd been to prison before but it was as dark as the earth in this one and) "Girl." (she wasn't afraid butwhatiftheymadehertellsomething she wasn't going to tell anything, it didn't matter what they did she'd tell nothing of Florian nothing nothing nothing how was she going to get out was she going to get out)
"Girl," the officer said again.
She met his eyes and curled her lip.
"Tell us about Florian and we let you go," he said, cajoling. "You serve with him? You seen death. You want it should happen to you? It not happen if you tell. Good girl."
"I'm telling nothing."
"Ditya, tell girl what happen."
The soldier smiled at her. "If you do not talk to him, I will take you away and you will talk to me. It is better to talk to him. It does not hurt you to talk to him."
"He speak truth."
She looked at them silently.
The officer sighed tiredly and took his papers up again. "Leave her little time with me and come back." The soldier bowed, quick and elegant, and was gone. The officer raised his eyebrows at her, his expression unexpectedly gentle. "He sharp man. Tell me now it is better."
Silence.
"I have heart for girl. Have girl at home very small. She pretty smile. You should pretty smile and maybe have man give love gift. It is better. You tell me anything Florian you know, I let you go, you go to man and love, much better than die here or tell me when you broken. Yes? I speak you very poor, but I speak my heart word, that is good. Tell me now and go home."
He looked at her expectantly, and she said nothing.
"Poor little girl," he said, and went back to his papers.
A while later the soldier returned, and took her out.
At first it didn't seem so terrible; some quiet part of her that looked at all of it almost detached was a little surprised that she had been afraid. At first the soldier struck her mouth, and whipped her, and she bled brightly, but she kept her silence. Then he broke her legs, and the idea of defying him by not crying out suddenly seemed very stupid, all false bravado and something that braggarts say they've done to impress people who don't understand that when pain is so vast that it makes up the entire world there's so shame in screaming. She screamed. Her red hair fell around her bare shoulders and its wild unruly tangles clotted with blood and dirt and sweat, and she let the soldier hear that he had hurt her.
Of Florian she said nothing.
The soldier let her rest a day, gave her water to drink almost tenderly, holding her head up and pouring it into her mouth. He asked her if she had anything to tell him, but she shook her head. Then he held her under the water until the moment when she felt her body buck under his hands and knew that she was dying; when that moment came he lifted her out and let her breathe, and then put her under again. When he had done that and still she would not speak, he took the water away and applied fire.
She hadn't any hesitation in her screaming any more, and she did nothing to stem her tears. She had never cried before. It came very naturally with the hot irons, and her back blistered and her broken legs ached as though something had bitten her and still clung to her with its teeth sunk in, and the whipping felt very distant and almost welcome. She couldn't remember it hurting at all.
The soldier gave her another day, more water, and it made her a little sick to look at it but she drank it with him helping her, and once that was done he asked her again if there was anything she wanted to tell him, and she looked at him fiercely, with the dull fierceness of a half-dead mother-animal that still guards its young. Silently she told him that she had nothing to tell him.
For the first half of the day he beat her; he stood her against the wall and let her lean against it just enough to stay upright but not so much the weight was off her legs, and beat her until she felt parts of herself give way. Then he cut away her matted hair, cut it close. He lay her back and the back of her neck open with the knife he had used on her hair, and, that done, bathed her in salt and bandaged her.
Her dress had been taken from her at the first, and when he had finished with her he took her out of the room that smelled of her blood and dressed her in coarse brown cloth.
"I will speak with you again to-morrow morning," he told her. "If you are good and tell me what I ask I will clean your wounds. Think while you wait for me."
She sat in a corner of the cell, drawn inward to herself, and made low, aching sounds. There was no place when she was without pain, no place where her body eased; she arched away from the salt in her back but could not escape it, and she tried to tear away the bandages but her hands were chained so she couldn't get them behind her, and she wore her wrists raw and bleeding but it did no good. She didn't sleep. Time passed, and the soldier did not come.
She waited for him. For hours she waited. She sat in her corner without moving, and felt no need to move, but finally she realised that she was thirsty and he had not come with her water, and her throat burned for it. She began to move around the cell. Along one wall she found a damp place where old water was seeping slowly through the stone, and she pressed her mouth against it, sucking in the dirt along with the wetness.
The soldier still did not come. She grew used to unfolding herself a few times a day to drink at the wall, and the rest of the time stayed still in her corner. Soon there was almost nothing left in her but a small, certain pride. She had never said anything about Florian.
Then, once day, the door to the cell scraped and light flooded in.
She sat very still.
"Oh, heaven. Hey! There's one in this one, too!" There was a sound of feet, and someone came to her and knelt beside her, passing a hand over her head. "There, now, girlie, it's all right. We'll have you out."
Another figure entered and stood beside the kneeling man. "That's the fifth one."
"Look at her."
"I'm looking, damn it. Let's get her out with the others."
Hands at her elbows, arms cupped around her, and she was lifted. At the weight on her legs she cried out.
"It's all right. We're getting you out."
"No, that's not it. Something about her knees." The woman bent to look at her, and ran careful hands along her legs. At the breaks she cried again. "No, it's lower. There. They're broken. Here, let's carry her." She lifted her into her arms. "Doesn't weigh a thing. It's like carrying my son. Come on, let's get out."
They took her along the dark passage, led by lantern-light, and into the sun. There was a small cluster of people like her, dirty, white-skinned, shrunken. Their eyes were all the same. They squinted at the light and huddled mistrustfully. The man and woman put her with them and went back into the Carolia; in the meantime, a man burned dark from the wind came from the gatehouse inside the walls with a bucket and a dipper and began to dip water for the people from the prison.
She sat on the ground because she couldn't stand, and when he came to her the man paused and looked intently. Suddenly his face cleared.
"Zara?"
She looked back at him blankly. Every part of her still hurt, and every time she became used to it she hurt differently. The salt bandaged to her back seared. The name, the name was hers, but it had been a long time since she'd heard it, and the pain had all but driven it away.
The man straightened and called out into the gatehouse. "Hey, Laurel! Where's Florian now?"
"Still the Montmollin town house," somebody shouted back.
"Get him here, can't you?"
"You're always a bother!" the voice shouted. "I'll send Hart in half a moment."
The man crouched down beside her and helped her to drink the water the way the soldier had. "I expect you remember me," he said. "I sold letter-paper. Remember? You came nearly every other day during the consulship. It's been dissolved. The consulship, I mean. My shop, too. It got burned the day we threw out the directorate. That's gone to the devil, and good riddance. We've only just now started going through the Carolia. You wouldn't believe how many we found still there, just at the first level. They've been bringing them out in batches. You and this lot were down underground. It's a terrible business we waited so long to fetch them out, but we've been busy putting everything back together. The Queen abdicated. She's gone clean out of Westmark, and they say she's not in Regia, either. Consul Theo went with her. Consul Justin's dead. Florian's living in the Montmollin house, what's not burned. I remember you were his second. He'll see you well taken care of. You're safe now."
It came into her head that she wanted to be left alone. She didn't know how to say it, so she was silent. She noticed that the gaunt people around her were clothed mostly in blankets. She was the only one wearing clothes. It surprised her.
The man went on talking until suddenly he was interrupted by feet and a voice. She didn't bother looking up; it hurt too much, and the man was on his feet, rushing over to greet whoever had come, and she closed her eyes and was glad of the peace from his talk.
Presently someone came and stood over her.
"Zara."
She opened her eyes and looked up at the person tiredly, and was aware of knowing him. His face was worn and his hair was greyed, and looking at her his eyes grew strange and his mouth tightened. He turned to the man beside him and said something, and the man nodded and walked away; he stayed, his strange eyes on her, until the man returned, spoke. They broke the chains on her wrists and freed her hands. For the second time she was lifted up, this time by the person whom she knew. He carried her, out of the prison courtyard and into the streets to a tall, half-gutted building, and went inside, up stairs, to a quiet room.
There he stripped off her coarse shift and then undid the bandages. He said nothing, but the few times she saw his face it was hard and his mouth was set. He washed her back clean of the salt and blood, put salve in the wounds, and bandaged them again freshly--he cleaned her face and her hair and the rest of her body, called in another man with a bag of medical supplies, who set her legs and put a cool white cream on what was left of the burns. They discovered that her ribs and her shoulder were broken and cast them. When all of this was done he lay her in the bed there and stayed by her until she slept.
She woke in the darkness and knew herself, but the knowing hurt. Florian had fallen asleep in a chair beside the bed. Suddenly she wanted nothing in the world as much as to wake him and hear him and tell him what she had done for him--she was angry, so angry that she almost couldn't breathe with it, and she wanted him to know, wanted him to hear what the soldier had done to her and how she had never told that she knew him, in the face of all of it. She had never spoken of him.
But Florian was sleeping, and Zara put her head down and watched him sleep silently.
In the morning he brought her food and water and sat beside her on the bed, his arm around her to brace her as he guided her hands in eating.
For a long time he didn't speak. Finally he put aside the breakfast tray and said, very softly,--
"Well. I'm afraid I don't have any fine words for you."
Zara looked at him dumbly.
"No, words won't do, will they?" He touched her cheek. "Then we'll do without them for the time being."
He lay back on the bed and she clutched him and held to him for a long time.
After that they lived in relative silence. He spoke to her, but she never answered with words. Her wounds healed slowly. The rawness on her back turned to white scars, the burns turned to shiny red ones, her legs became straight and held her when she stood on them, and the places where she'd been whipped faded to marks. Her ribs stopped aching and she walked around the house free of everything but a loose shift, wandering into all the rooms, whole or half-burned, as if it were the first time she'd seen them. Florian sometimes followed her.
In the end she always came back to her room and stayed there. She didn't hurt any longer, save for sometimes the memory of it in her back or her insides, but something stopped in her, something had caught inside her, and she felt too tired to go outside.
One evening after they had eaten Florian sat in the chair beside the bed and watched her for a while, and then said,--
"I'm sorry."
She turned to him.
"They told me that you had died, you know, the moment I arrived in Marianstat." He crossed his long legs and spoke very quietly and evenly. "I hadn't time to think of what it meant. You were so much to me, my strong right hand," he almost but didn't quite smile at the phrase, "and my bravest, my bitter conscience."
Zara did not take her eyes from him, but she knotted at her dress. It was pale green. She wore no black now.
"I realised that it had never occurred to me to give you anything while you lived. I only thought of it when I believed you were dead. And I'm sorry that it took that."
Somehow she understood that despite his even tone it was difficult for him to speak, and it meant something to her, but the feeling was dull under her chest, a feeling that stirred underneath the white scars but didn't pierce them. She shook her head and lay down. Florian closed his eyes briefly and then rose, came to touch her hair and run his thumb along her cheek, and then to turn away.
"I don't know what I can give you now, but if you think of anything--" Again there was the touch of almost-humour, but it slipped and his hand fell again to her face, more gently even than the soldier when he held her and helped her to drink. "Oh, my child."
Suddenly something lurched in her.
"I didn't tell them anything," Zara said.
Her throat felt strange and heavy and thick, but her voice was the same as it had always been, rough, low, sharp around the edges. She frowned at him.
"I know you didn't," he said, and when he looked at her she saw that his face had gone crooked and a little strange. "Thank you."
She began to talk again after that, first in short sentences and briefly, and then, as they remained cocooned in the house and she saw the city change for seasons that she didn't feel, a little more and more. Soon they began to have whole conversations. They spoke of nothing present, only of the past; of her few friends, all dead now, of the battles she had fought with him, of the hungry winters full of frost and blood; even of the day he first found her alone, when her feet were black and sore and she had given up everything except begging and sleeping, when he first called her his child and she looked at him from the darkness of her street corner and told him to throw her money or go to the devil, and he asked her to come home with him, and she told him she wanted the money first and she'd choose the place. Then he knelt beside her and said, in the soft different voice that meant he must be obeyed, that she was to come with him. When she followed him he brought her to a warm inn and fed her and showed her a girl called Rina, a girl bruised and skittish and beautiful.
Zara did her only crying in the Carolia, and speaking of Rina her face didn't change.
Florian said tiredly that sometimes he dreamed of them, of his stolen children; under her scars the old feeling stirred, lifted itself, and went motionless again.
When she spoke, it was as she always had. She was clipped and short, sceptical and bitter and angry, she laughed roughly at things she didn't agree with, and didn't agree with anything, not even Florian. He began to call her his good sense again, his conscience.
It felt like an outside world. Everything she said she heard through a veil, and inside she was detached, buried, inside was the dullness that she was, that had nothing to do with anything spoken and was unmoved by it. She called him an idiot and hounded him over his eating--he never ate enough--but she felt nothing.
She was still young, but there was nothing youthful in her.
He attended to her quietly. His eyes, even when he laughed, were heavy. They talked as though they were any two ordinary people, brother and sister, husband and wife, but it went no further, and when they had stopped speaking of Stock and Justin and Nierkeeping, when they put aside the words, two strange unwhole people lived in his father's half-burned house, eating at his father's table, sleeping separately in his father's beds. The words became memories and dreams and unrest.
One night Zara screamed in her sleep. Florian came to her room and sat by her and smoothed her hair, grown down to her thin shoulders, and when she wouldn't calm he woke her. She shook her head, she laughed at herself. She pulled her blanket over her. Outside it had become summer; she was always cold.
He might have stayed with her. Instead he smoothed her hair again and went to his own room.
They neither of them dreamed.
Outside the windows, Westmark's republic flourished, not without trouble. Trouble was only part of life. The people argued and talked, met in the marketplaces and sold fish and cloth, went to the university and learned, built houses and waggons, day after day, and once in a while they left home to vote. Florian took some part in it, but when they asked him to do more he said his time for that was past. He said it smilingly, with gentle, wry humour. No one protested too much. The world was going its way, Westmark, sharing its trade with Regia, was prosperous; its new experiment, what the Queen had left to it, was working well enough.
When Florian went out, Zara stayed in the house.
He never asked anything of her.
She was growing colder, day after day; she didn't like to move, she stopped looking around the rooms, and for the most part she stayed in her bed and only got up for meals. She thought she should be moving; there was something she should be doing, but she was tired. Her scars grew whiter and older. Florian stayed in with her, her quiet companion, as the grey in his hair became the only colour there, and he talked with her sometimes, but they talked less now.
Her own red hair was never rich again. Sometimes he brushed it for her, very carefully, and she thought that a long time ago she'd imagined him doing so and wanted it badly, but now it only seemed like something that was, something matter-of-fact, something ordinary. Florian brushed her hair, the same way he ate with her or sat with her before she slept.
In the place beneath her scars she hurt, and she did her best to cover it and leave it and forget what it wanted to stir up and remember. In the place beneath her scars she thought they were both crippled.
Once she started to talk to him about Stock, and saw his eyes. She fell silent midsentence.
He looked up at her, prompting. She shook her head.
"What's wrong?"
"Nothing."
"I have never in my life believed anyone who said that," he said, almost smiling.
"Idiot. You don't like remembering."
"It's no reason I shouldn't."
Zara folded herself inwards, still looking at his eyes, listening to his voice, so quiet, so even, no self-reproach anyone could hear but which was there. For a moment, she thought she might have told him it wasn't his fault because she truly believed it, or that it was his fault because she was angry and she had been alone so long in the Carolia--but then she shrugged and said,--
"Not your fault," only because it was the right thing to say, and she was tired.
She could see he didn't believe her.
It didn't matter.
That night she lay awake--weary in her healed bones, her white scars, her shiny red ones--and understood that it didn't matter. She didn't know who was at fault, and she didn't care, and it wouldn't matter even if she did care. Westmark was alive. Its wars and the people who were broken in them had gone quiet and let themselves turn shadowed, and they wouldn't try to make themselves noticed or ask for anything except their quiet, because they might heal in it, or they might die in it, but at least they wouldn't be asked to remember. She didn't want to remember, she didn't want to decide fault. She didn't want anything. She would live in the half-burned Montmollin house until she died and it didn't matter whether what was in the place under her scars woke or not.
If it did, no one was left to notice except Florian, anyway.
So she drew her blanket closer and let everything sleep.
Title: Heart Word
Characters/Pairings: Strange, loose Zara/Florian.
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: People not dying when they should, gratuitous torture, strange dialogue, and the stealing of Kali's backstory for Rina, which only makes a cameo appearance anyway.
Notes: For Manon, who was horrible and made me write it.
Heart Word
Darkness.
She stood, staggering, and leaned herself against a rough wall; there was dirt dampness against her cheek, grimy and breathing cold. Her stomach ached and coiled with sickness. Somewhere off a bit someone was speaking, in a low, hurried voice.
"...I'd know her anywhere, Florian's second in command. We fought together once, back during the war. She'd be worth asking questions."
"That is good information." A second voice, accented.
"Yes, it is," eagerly. "It's worth something."
"You want your freedom?" Scornful.
"You wouldn't have known otherwise. You've got Firedrake. You can get something out of her--"
The dull sound of a musket hitting someone. A groan. She tightened her jaw as the sickness pushed upwards, and tried to make sense of what she'd heard. What she remembered before this was-- they hadn't killed her. The soldier who'd bayoneted her hadn't killed her. Twice he stabbed her, and then someone from the other side had struck her in the head with his gun. She bit at the sickness again. She was alive.
Before she had time to think further, someone took her arm roughly and pulled her upright.
"You. Girl. What is your name?" It was the accented voice.
She spat.
"Firedrake, eh? Eh?" Someone shook her. "That is your name?"
"Don't know what you're talkin' about," she said, and then the sickness escaped her, like an upwards wave. In the darkness she heard the accented voice say,--
"Pig manners. To be expected of Westmark pigs." It laughed with a bitter contempt. "Come, we will see what you know of Master Florian. Come, girl." She was jerked along, down a passage that smelled of dead things, of sickness, and she understood now where she was, she'd been taken to the Carolia, and as light shone at the end of the passage she saw the rough dirt and stone walls, the thick doors of cells. There was a dull ache in her body from the bayonets, and an ache in her head where she'd been struck. The voice that had hold of her belonged to a soldier, resplendent in red, who at last pushed her into a somewhat cleaner room where an officer sat reading a sheaf of papers. His eyes were flat with boredom. The soldier rapped with his musket on the floor and stood at attention, forcing her downwards into a crooked semblance of a bow.
The officer raised his head and broke into a rapid foreign tongue, gesturing at her. She hardly noticed.
(They'dcaughtherthey'dcaughther it didn't do any good, all her jeering and biting and yelling, they were supposed to kill her but they'd caught her and she'd been to prison before but it was as dark as the earth in this one and) "Girl." (she wasn't afraid butwhatiftheymadehertellsomething she wasn't going to tell anything, it didn't matter what they did she'd tell nothing of Florian nothing nothing nothing how was she going to get out was she going to get out)
"Girl," the officer said again.
She met his eyes and curled her lip.
"Tell us about Florian and we let you go," he said, cajoling. "You serve with him? You seen death. You want it should happen to you? It not happen if you tell. Good girl."
"I'm telling nothing."
"Ditya, tell girl what happen."
The soldier smiled at her. "If you do not talk to him, I will take you away and you will talk to me. It is better to talk to him. It does not hurt you to talk to him."
"He speak truth."
She looked at them silently.
The officer sighed tiredly and took his papers up again. "Leave her little time with me and come back." The soldier bowed, quick and elegant, and was gone. The officer raised his eyebrows at her, his expression unexpectedly gentle. "He sharp man. Tell me now it is better."
Silence.
"I have heart for girl. Have girl at home very small. She pretty smile. You should pretty smile and maybe have man give love gift. It is better. You tell me anything Florian you know, I let you go, you go to man and love, much better than die here or tell me when you broken. Yes? I speak you very poor, but I speak my heart word, that is good. Tell me now and go home."
He looked at her expectantly, and she said nothing.
"Poor little girl," he said, and went back to his papers.
A while later the soldier returned, and took her out.
At first it didn't seem so terrible; some quiet part of her that looked at all of it almost detached was a little surprised that she had been afraid. At first the soldier struck her mouth, and whipped her, and she bled brightly, but she kept her silence. Then he broke her legs, and the idea of defying him by not crying out suddenly seemed very stupid, all false bravado and something that braggarts say they've done to impress people who don't understand that when pain is so vast that it makes up the entire world there's so shame in screaming. She screamed. Her red hair fell around her bare shoulders and its wild unruly tangles clotted with blood and dirt and sweat, and she let the soldier hear that he had hurt her.
Of Florian she said nothing.
The soldier let her rest a day, gave her water to drink almost tenderly, holding her head up and pouring it into her mouth. He asked her if she had anything to tell him, but she shook her head. Then he held her under the water until the moment when she felt her body buck under his hands and knew that she was dying; when that moment came he lifted her out and let her breathe, and then put her under again. When he had done that and still she would not speak, he took the water away and applied fire.
She hadn't any hesitation in her screaming any more, and she did nothing to stem her tears. She had never cried before. It came very naturally with the hot irons, and her back blistered and her broken legs ached as though something had bitten her and still clung to her with its teeth sunk in, and the whipping felt very distant and almost welcome. She couldn't remember it hurting at all.
The soldier gave her another day, more water, and it made her a little sick to look at it but she drank it with him helping her, and once that was done he asked her again if there was anything she wanted to tell him, and she looked at him fiercely, with the dull fierceness of a half-dead mother-animal that still guards its young. Silently she told him that she had nothing to tell him.
For the first half of the day he beat her; he stood her against the wall and let her lean against it just enough to stay upright but not so much the weight was off her legs, and beat her until she felt parts of herself give way. Then he cut away her matted hair, cut it close. He lay her back and the back of her neck open with the knife he had used on her hair, and, that done, bathed her in salt and bandaged her.
Her dress had been taken from her at the first, and when he had finished with her he took her out of the room that smelled of her blood and dressed her in coarse brown cloth.
"I will speak with you again to-morrow morning," he told her. "If you are good and tell me what I ask I will clean your wounds. Think while you wait for me."
She sat in a corner of the cell, drawn inward to herself, and made low, aching sounds. There was no place when she was without pain, no place where her body eased; she arched away from the salt in her back but could not escape it, and she tried to tear away the bandages but her hands were chained so she couldn't get them behind her, and she wore her wrists raw and bleeding but it did no good. She didn't sleep. Time passed, and the soldier did not come.
She waited for him. For hours she waited. She sat in her corner without moving, and felt no need to move, but finally she realised that she was thirsty and he had not come with her water, and her throat burned for it. She began to move around the cell. Along one wall she found a damp place where old water was seeping slowly through the stone, and she pressed her mouth against it, sucking in the dirt along with the wetness.
The soldier still did not come. She grew used to unfolding herself a few times a day to drink at the wall, and the rest of the time stayed still in her corner. Soon there was almost nothing left in her but a small, certain pride. She had never said anything about Florian.
Then, once day, the door to the cell scraped and light flooded in.
She sat very still.
"Oh, heaven. Hey! There's one in this one, too!" There was a sound of feet, and someone came to her and knelt beside her, passing a hand over her head. "There, now, girlie, it's all right. We'll have you out."
Another figure entered and stood beside the kneeling man. "That's the fifth one."
"Look at her."
"I'm looking, damn it. Let's get her out with the others."
Hands at her elbows, arms cupped around her, and she was lifted. At the weight on her legs she cried out.
"It's all right. We're getting you out."
"No, that's not it. Something about her knees." The woman bent to look at her, and ran careful hands along her legs. At the breaks she cried again. "No, it's lower. There. They're broken. Here, let's carry her." She lifted her into her arms. "Doesn't weigh a thing. It's like carrying my son. Come on, let's get out."
They took her along the dark passage, led by lantern-light, and into the sun. There was a small cluster of people like her, dirty, white-skinned, shrunken. Their eyes were all the same. They squinted at the light and huddled mistrustfully. The man and woman put her with them and went back into the Carolia; in the meantime, a man burned dark from the wind came from the gatehouse inside the walls with a bucket and a dipper and began to dip water for the people from the prison.
She sat on the ground because she couldn't stand, and when he came to her the man paused and looked intently. Suddenly his face cleared.
"Zara?"
She looked back at him blankly. Every part of her still hurt, and every time she became used to it she hurt differently. The salt bandaged to her back seared. The name, the name was hers, but it had been a long time since she'd heard it, and the pain had all but driven it away.
The man straightened and called out into the gatehouse. "Hey, Laurel! Where's Florian now?"
"Still the Montmollin town house," somebody shouted back.
"Get him here, can't you?"
"You're always a bother!" the voice shouted. "I'll send Hart in half a moment."
The man crouched down beside her and helped her to drink the water the way the soldier had. "I expect you remember me," he said. "I sold letter-paper. Remember? You came nearly every other day during the consulship. It's been dissolved. The consulship, I mean. My shop, too. It got burned the day we threw out the directorate. That's gone to the devil, and good riddance. We've only just now started going through the Carolia. You wouldn't believe how many we found still there, just at the first level. They've been bringing them out in batches. You and this lot were down underground. It's a terrible business we waited so long to fetch them out, but we've been busy putting everything back together. The Queen abdicated. She's gone clean out of Westmark, and they say she's not in Regia, either. Consul Theo went with her. Consul Justin's dead. Florian's living in the Montmollin house, what's not burned. I remember you were his second. He'll see you well taken care of. You're safe now."
It came into her head that she wanted to be left alone. She didn't know how to say it, so she was silent. She noticed that the gaunt people around her were clothed mostly in blankets. She was the only one wearing clothes. It surprised her.
The man went on talking until suddenly he was interrupted by feet and a voice. She didn't bother looking up; it hurt too much, and the man was on his feet, rushing over to greet whoever had come, and she closed her eyes and was glad of the peace from his talk.
Presently someone came and stood over her.
"Zara."
She opened her eyes and looked up at the person tiredly, and was aware of knowing him. His face was worn and his hair was greyed, and looking at her his eyes grew strange and his mouth tightened. He turned to the man beside him and said something, and the man nodded and walked away; he stayed, his strange eyes on her, until the man returned, spoke. They broke the chains on her wrists and freed her hands. For the second time she was lifted up, this time by the person whom she knew. He carried her, out of the prison courtyard and into the streets to a tall, half-gutted building, and went inside, up stairs, to a quiet room.
There he stripped off her coarse shift and then undid the bandages. He said nothing, but the few times she saw his face it was hard and his mouth was set. He washed her back clean of the salt and blood, put salve in the wounds, and bandaged them again freshly--he cleaned her face and her hair and the rest of her body, called in another man with a bag of medical supplies, who set her legs and put a cool white cream on what was left of the burns. They discovered that her ribs and her shoulder were broken and cast them. When all of this was done he lay her in the bed there and stayed by her until she slept.
She woke in the darkness and knew herself, but the knowing hurt. Florian had fallen asleep in a chair beside the bed. Suddenly she wanted nothing in the world as much as to wake him and hear him and tell him what she had done for him--she was angry, so angry that she almost couldn't breathe with it, and she wanted him to know, wanted him to hear what the soldier had done to her and how she had never told that she knew him, in the face of all of it. She had never spoken of him.
But Florian was sleeping, and Zara put her head down and watched him sleep silently.
In the morning he brought her food and water and sat beside her on the bed, his arm around her to brace her as he guided her hands in eating.
For a long time he didn't speak. Finally he put aside the breakfast tray and said, very softly,--
"Well. I'm afraid I don't have any fine words for you."
Zara looked at him dumbly.
"No, words won't do, will they?" He touched her cheek. "Then we'll do without them for the time being."
He lay back on the bed and she clutched him and held to him for a long time.
After that they lived in relative silence. He spoke to her, but she never answered with words. Her wounds healed slowly. The rawness on her back turned to white scars, the burns turned to shiny red ones, her legs became straight and held her when she stood on them, and the places where she'd been whipped faded to marks. Her ribs stopped aching and she walked around the house free of everything but a loose shift, wandering into all the rooms, whole or half-burned, as if it were the first time she'd seen them. Florian sometimes followed her.
In the end she always came back to her room and stayed there. She didn't hurt any longer, save for sometimes the memory of it in her back or her insides, but something stopped in her, something had caught inside her, and she felt too tired to go outside.
One evening after they had eaten Florian sat in the chair beside the bed and watched her for a while, and then said,--
"I'm sorry."
She turned to him.
"They told me that you had died, you know, the moment I arrived in Marianstat." He crossed his long legs and spoke very quietly and evenly. "I hadn't time to think of what it meant. You were so much to me, my strong right hand," he almost but didn't quite smile at the phrase, "and my bravest, my bitter conscience."
Zara did not take her eyes from him, but she knotted at her dress. It was pale green. She wore no black now.
"I realised that it had never occurred to me to give you anything while you lived. I only thought of it when I believed you were dead. And I'm sorry that it took that."
Somehow she understood that despite his even tone it was difficult for him to speak, and it meant something to her, but the feeling was dull under her chest, a feeling that stirred underneath the white scars but didn't pierce them. She shook her head and lay down. Florian closed his eyes briefly and then rose, came to touch her hair and run his thumb along her cheek, and then to turn away.
"I don't know what I can give you now, but if you think of anything--" Again there was the touch of almost-humour, but it slipped and his hand fell again to her face, more gently even than the soldier when he held her and helped her to drink. "Oh, my child."
Suddenly something lurched in her.
"I didn't tell them anything," Zara said.
Her throat felt strange and heavy and thick, but her voice was the same as it had always been, rough, low, sharp around the edges. She frowned at him.
"I know you didn't," he said, and when he looked at her she saw that his face had gone crooked and a little strange. "Thank you."
She began to talk again after that, first in short sentences and briefly, and then, as they remained cocooned in the house and she saw the city change for seasons that she didn't feel, a little more and more. Soon they began to have whole conversations. They spoke of nothing present, only of the past; of her few friends, all dead now, of the battles she had fought with him, of the hungry winters full of frost and blood; even of the day he first found her alone, when her feet were black and sore and she had given up everything except begging and sleeping, when he first called her his child and she looked at him from the darkness of her street corner and told him to throw her money or go to the devil, and he asked her to come home with him, and she told him she wanted the money first and she'd choose the place. Then he knelt beside her and said, in the soft different voice that meant he must be obeyed, that she was to come with him. When she followed him he brought her to a warm inn and fed her and showed her a girl called Rina, a girl bruised and skittish and beautiful.
Zara did her only crying in the Carolia, and speaking of Rina her face didn't change.
Florian said tiredly that sometimes he dreamed of them, of his stolen children; under her scars the old feeling stirred, lifted itself, and went motionless again.
When she spoke, it was as she always had. She was clipped and short, sceptical and bitter and angry, she laughed roughly at things she didn't agree with, and didn't agree with anything, not even Florian. He began to call her his good sense again, his conscience.
It felt like an outside world. Everything she said she heard through a veil, and inside she was detached, buried, inside was the dullness that she was, that had nothing to do with anything spoken and was unmoved by it. She called him an idiot and hounded him over his eating--he never ate enough--but she felt nothing.
She was still young, but there was nothing youthful in her.
He attended to her quietly. His eyes, even when he laughed, were heavy. They talked as though they were any two ordinary people, brother and sister, husband and wife, but it went no further, and when they had stopped speaking of Stock and Justin and Nierkeeping, when they put aside the words, two strange unwhole people lived in his father's half-burned house, eating at his father's table, sleeping separately in his father's beds. The words became memories and dreams and unrest.
One night Zara screamed in her sleep. Florian came to her room and sat by her and smoothed her hair, grown down to her thin shoulders, and when she wouldn't calm he woke her. She shook her head, she laughed at herself. She pulled her blanket over her. Outside it had become summer; she was always cold.
He might have stayed with her. Instead he smoothed her hair again and went to his own room.
They neither of them dreamed.
Outside the windows, Westmark's republic flourished, not without trouble. Trouble was only part of life. The people argued and talked, met in the marketplaces and sold fish and cloth, went to the university and learned, built houses and waggons, day after day, and once in a while they left home to vote. Florian took some part in it, but when they asked him to do more he said his time for that was past. He said it smilingly, with gentle, wry humour. No one protested too much. The world was going its way, Westmark, sharing its trade with Regia, was prosperous; its new experiment, what the Queen had left to it, was working well enough.
When Florian went out, Zara stayed in the house.
He never asked anything of her.
She was growing colder, day after day; she didn't like to move, she stopped looking around the rooms, and for the most part she stayed in her bed and only got up for meals. She thought she should be moving; there was something she should be doing, but she was tired. Her scars grew whiter and older. Florian stayed in with her, her quiet companion, as the grey in his hair became the only colour there, and he talked with her sometimes, but they talked less now.
Her own red hair was never rich again. Sometimes he brushed it for her, very carefully, and she thought that a long time ago she'd imagined him doing so and wanted it badly, but now it only seemed like something that was, something matter-of-fact, something ordinary. Florian brushed her hair, the same way he ate with her or sat with her before she slept.
In the place beneath her scars she hurt, and she did her best to cover it and leave it and forget what it wanted to stir up and remember. In the place beneath her scars she thought they were both crippled.
Once she started to talk to him about Stock, and saw his eyes. She fell silent midsentence.
He looked up at her, prompting. She shook her head.
"What's wrong?"
"Nothing."
"I have never in my life believed anyone who said that," he said, almost smiling.
"Idiot. You don't like remembering."
"It's no reason I shouldn't."
Zara folded herself inwards, still looking at his eyes, listening to his voice, so quiet, so even, no self-reproach anyone could hear but which was there. For a moment, she thought she might have told him it wasn't his fault because she truly believed it, or that it was his fault because she was angry and she had been alone so long in the Carolia--but then she shrugged and said,--
"Not your fault," only because it was the right thing to say, and she was tired.
She could see he didn't believe her.
It didn't matter.
That night she lay awake--weary in her healed bones, her white scars, her shiny red ones--and understood that it didn't matter. She didn't know who was at fault, and she didn't care, and it wouldn't matter even if she did care. Westmark was alive. Its wars and the people who were broken in them had gone quiet and let themselves turn shadowed, and they wouldn't try to make themselves noticed or ask for anything except their quiet, because they might heal in it, or they might die in it, but at least they wouldn't be asked to remember. She didn't want to remember, she didn't want to decide fault. She didn't want anything. She would live in the half-burned Montmollin house until she died and it didn't matter whether what was in the place under her scars woke or not.
If it did, no one was left to notice except Florian, anyway.
So she drew her blanket closer and let everything sleep.
