Chapter XXXIX: Final Reconciliations

 

By the morning of my third day in Yazthaan, the surviving forces of Bluerosers and Durkahni were assembled and ready to take back Zrimash. I wished that they’d waited a little longer. The wound I’d taken from the thunderfang was healing faster than it possibly could have on anyone who wasn’t me, but a deep impaling injury like that was still going to take a while. It also didn’t help that Dr. Charcharias could barely stand to be in the same room as me for long enough to treat it.

I was dragged out of bed several hours too early and taken off to be equipped from the Yazthaan storehouses. The situation was a good deal better than when I’d been forced to flee from Zrimash; I had a backup sword, my overcoat actually fit me, my spare bullets went in a proper pouch instead of being shoved into my pockets, and they even gave me an electric lantern. By the time I was done, I felt just about ready. Ready to stagger out of the storehouse, curse the sun for being so goddamned bright, and start searching for Lady Halflance, that is. 

Doing so was both hard and easy. Easy in that she was in the same tents as the rest of the commanding officers and leaders of the army, so anyone who knew anything was able to point me in her direction when I asked. Hard in that, in the chaos of the last-minute preparations, just going from one end of the town to the other proved a bit of a nightmare. It was a chaotic several minutes of shoving my way through crowds, getting lost, and other things that I was way too tired to be doing at that particular moment, before I found her. I pushed through the tent flap, thoroughly exhausted, to be met by Halflance’s glare of absolute disdain.

“You’re late.”

“It’s barely even dawn yet,” I said through gritted teeth. “How could I be fucking late?”

“This is, more or less, a military procession,” she said, face utterly bare of expression. “You’re lucky we didn’t leave you behind an hour ago.”

I looked to Sir Margaret, who was also there, for support. None was given. “It’s always something with you, isn’t it?”

“You should give her more credit,” said Rook, though without taking her eyes off of a large map spread out on one of the nearby tables. “She needs her extra rest after killing an elite Cassandran agent and saving dozens of lives. That sort of thing is tiring, trust me.”

Halflance subtly rolled her eyes. “I am merely stating the facts, Rook. A thousand dead Cassandrans left to moulder in the fields would not make my ward any less late. I already gave you your commendation for that act of… admittedly impressive bravery.”

I had mixed feelings about that “commendation”. I was so exhausted after fighting the Musician that I’d immediately returned to my cabin to curl into the fetal position and cry for the next four hours; it was only when one of the guards had come knocking on my door about the corpse that I explained it. Halflance had looked honestly, completely shocked, in a way I’d basically never seen from her before. Her words of thanks were brief, but honest.

“You’ve exceeded yourself, Emma, once again. I shudder to imagine what might have happened if you weren’t there to intercept her. Perhaps when this disaster is all over, we can talk about your skills.”

And that was all I got, because immediately afterwards she assigned me to help wash the falts (a task I could still perform with my wound), and that was that. No more commendation for me. I wasn’t sure whether that sudden display of softness was her putting something on, or taking off a layer of defensiveness. It almost felt like it didn’t matter.

“Am I even late, though? Doesn’t seem like I’ve missed anything that I would actually have a reason to be present for.”

Halflance paused to take a written report from a soldier that had entered the tent behind me. “I need every member of my staff collected into one place, that nobody will get lost. Even Charcharias, as undisciplined as she can be, arrived twenty minutes ago.”

“Charcharias is coming with us?”

Sir Margaret cut in. “She’s sort of the best doctor we have at the moment, even if she isn’t a soldier, and we’re going to need as much medical support as we can get after this battle. Or during it, for that matter, though it shouldn’t last long if this works well.”

Halflance nodded in her direction. “Exactly.”

I swore under my breath. Even more days having to constantly avoid the stream of passive-aggressive banter. “Well, now I’m here. What do you need me for?”

“To stand at my left side and look heroic,” she said. “People know about what you did a few days ago, and quite a few of them remember your heroics during the first battle of Zrimash. I’ll be giving a quick address to the troops before we set off, and you’ll enhance the effect.”

I paused, working through her verbiage to find the core of what she actually meant. “So… I’m a prop.”

“That’s a very coarse way of putting it…” Halflance said. 

Rook chuckled. “But an accurate one.”

And so, when Lady Halflance stood on top of a cart and looked out over our makeshift army, I was right at her side, doing my best impersonation of an animatronic. It wasn’t a very impressive army, all things considered. We had around four hundred soldiers, divided roughly evenly into three companies, one Blueroser, one Durkahni survivors of Zrimash, and one fresh militia from Yazthaan. More of a raiding party than a proper army, really.

Halflance’s speech was short and to the point, a basic reminder that the enemy would have no way to see us coming, that we would catch them off-guard, that we had a plan, etc. etc. It was functional, and I definitely saw a few faces harden with determination over the course of it. But it was over in a minute or so, and I thought that that was going to be that. 

Until Sarnai climbed up onto that cart with us, and quietly asked Lady Halflance for permission to briefly speak. Halflance certainly didn’t expect it, and neither did I; Sarnai had always been someone who knew fighting, not speaking. But, after a moment of hesitation, Halflance and I stepped back and allowed her to speak. 

Sarnai’s speech was immediately different from Halflance’s, in that it was unpolished, unscripted, clearly something that she’d had to come up with over the course of no more than a day. She started slowly, talking about her past in greater Imbrium, her experiences in Dinara’s guard. Even from further back, I could see the expressions on the watchers: mostly confusion from the humans, sneers and eye-rolling from the Durkahns. Even I started feeling a little sorry for her.

But as she pivoted away from just recounting her own past, things changed. As she described the Urcos plateau, the Durkahni people, and Zrimash as seen from an outsider’s perspective, her speech began to build momentum and vigor, her voice growing in size and power until it almost echoed between the tents. I’d seen Urcos, lived there for weeks, but her description made it sound like a mythic paradise.

And then came the hammer-blow. Urcos was a place of untamed natural beauty, of broad skies and unbounded freedom… and the Cassandrans were here to take it all away. The Cassandrans wanted to conquer Urcos, to industrialize it, to turn it into just another limb of their empire with which to tear coins from the unspoiled earth and shovel them into the gaping maw of Grand Rochathan. That was what was really at stake here; not just victory or defeat, but the fate of the entire region and the future of the Durkahns as a people.

Something I recognized was that she didn’t sugar-coat it: this was going to be hard as hell. But she also had an answer. In a long cavalcade, she made reference to all sorts of names and places that I didn’t recognize, but which the assembled onlookers clearly did. In context, the names of Durkahn and Bluerose heroes who had beaten stronger enemies than this, and the places where those victories took place. By the end of her speech, Sarnai was having to leave pauses almost every sentence for the soldiers to raise their fists into the air and shout their agreement. When she finally fell silent, almost out of breath, the applause went on for ages. 

Before they were even done clapping at her, Sarnai stepped back behind Halflance and I and made to step off of the cart. I stopped her. “That was incredible,” I whispered. “Where did that come from?”

Sarnai grinned. “I’ve had a lot to think about these last few days. Thank you, though, for your help back at the temple. I needed someone to practice on.”

And so we set out from Yazthaan in high spirits, with the faltry in the front and the rest of us trailing behind. The first few hours felt more like a parade, almost, than a march of war, with everyone joking and laughing and singing joking songs about Queen Cassandra’s love life. About half a day out from Yazthaan was when we left the territory that had been cleared out for us beforehand. At that point, the officers quieted everyone down as best as they could and started getting strict about marching order; after all, even a single stonewose seeing us and living to tell about it would render the whole mission pointless.

So that was how it was for the days on the march. Quiet, fast, and tense with expectation that a party of stonewose would be on top of us at any second. We’d make camp just before sundown, and even then we’d put up screens around our campfires to dilute the yellow glow spilling out over the twilit grasslands. Indeed, there were stonewose still on patrol, though they weren’t ready for us. Most of them, moving around in bands of ten or twenty, were never even visible from the main body of soldiers. The faltry scouts would find them, run them down, slaughter them to a woman, and I’d only hear about it later that day when the story spread to us.

We were caught off-guard exactly once, when a group of a dozen stonewose bumbled into us at a strange angle and was immediately shot full of holes from every angle. They didn’t even last long enough for me to get to the fighting. The shooting was over by the time I went from one end of the column to the other, and I arrived to find a dozen dead ghouls, two dead Bluerosers, and the smell of powder-smoke. 

I still had trouble sleeping at night. The Musician was gone, and I felt better about myself than I had in ages, but my sleep was still speckled with nightmares about the Musician, about the Blackbird, about Abby. When those woke me up, it was hard to fall asleep again because of the wound from the thunderfang. By that point it had more or less closed, reduced to a round knot of scar tissue that I could feel penetrating deep into my chest whenever I moved my shoulder, but it ached constantly. 

Finally I gave in, left Halflance’s tent, and sleepily strolled over to Dr. Charcharias’s medical station. She would have to have something for this, right? Even if it meant more verbal abuse.

I tried knocking, but you can’t knock on a tent flap. So I had to raise my voice. “Charcharias? Amina? I know you sleep in there, and I need your help. Please?”

No response. I looked around, wincing at the thought that I might accidentally wake up someone who needed the sleep more than I did. “Charcharias!” I said, a bit more loudly.

For several seconds I just stood there, soaking in the silence and rubbing uselessly at the scar. Even if Charcharias did wake up and hear me, she probably wouldn’t move out of bed for my sake, and furthermore it should have been obvious from the beginning that this was a fool’s errand. I was just turning around when I heard the vague sound of stirring from inside.

The tent-flap unbuttoned, and Charcharias stuck her head and torso out. She wasn’t wearing a shirt, and the height difference between us meant that I was face to face with the long gill-slits on the bottom of her ribcage. The cold mountain air wasn’t treating them well; they were red and dry and wide open, pulsating softly in time with her heartbeat. 

“What the hell do you want, Emma?” she said to me. Her expression conveyed misery, as did her voice; she hadn’t been sleeping well either.

I patted at my scar through the loose fabric of my shirt. “It fucking hurts,” I said. “Do you have anything for that?”

Charcharias sighed, looking me up and down through half-open eyes. “Come in,” she said, then turned around. 

The inside of the medical tent was even more sparse than the one in Zrimash. There were fewer tools, fewer supplies, and substantially more blood stains, with the only proper furniture being a low table for patients and Charcharias’s bed in the corner. By the time I stopped staring, agape, at the tent flaps and actually walked in, Charcharias was already rooting through a wooden chest in the back. It was one of those fold-out designs, like a toolbox.

“There’s something I wanted to talk about with you,” Charcharias said.

I folded my arms, leaning against the table. “Does it, by any chance, have to do with experimenting on me to figure out what makes me tick?”

She sighed, momentarily pausing her efforts. “Yes, but not in the way you think.”

“Alright,” I said. “So you’re not going to try to convince me again, or berate me, or cast aspersions upon my character?”

“No, Emma, I’m not.” Charcharias stood, now holding a small glass bottle full of white pills. She crossed the room, extending her hand to me, and said, “I want to talk. Please?”

I took the bottle, my eyes fixed firmly on the ground so as not to end up staring at her gills. “How many do I take?”

She shrugged, strolling over to the bed. “You’re small, but also basically invincible, so… two?”

I took two, dry, while Charcharias took her jacket from off of the bedpost and slipped it over her shoulders. “I’ve told you before where I come from, haven’t I? And the story of why I’m…” she gestured at her gill slits, “the way that I am?”

“You did,” I said. “Your first mother was experimented on in the Svenhal labs… something about injections of rendered shark tissue?”

She winced, then nodded. “They were testing their ability to manipulate the élan vital, to shape and meld flesh with electromagnetic fields. And, well, it clearly worked.”

“Against all logic,” I muttered.

“Against all logic.” Charcharias opened her mouth to say something, but lost her courage partway through. She stood up from the bed, paced over to the far corner of the tent, where a small barrel with a tap sat atop a side table. Charcharias poured a little water out into her hands, splashing it on her face and across her gills.

“Is something wrong?” I said. “You really don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to.”

“No!” Amina snapped. “You have to hear this, to understand the situation. I just… it’s not something that’s easy to talk about.”

I nodded, reaching under my collar to massage the scar tissue. “Okay. I’ll listen.”

“I’m a creation, a fusion of human genetic material with that of a white shark. And when you try to fuse genetic material from a mammal with that of a fish, the product is an absolute catastrophe, genetically speaking. Critical safeguards missing, proteins malformed, a whole variety of issues only slightly moderated by the fact that I have the strongest immune system of anyone I know whose name isn’t Emma Marcus Farrier.”

“I can imagine that,” I said, scared of what was going to come next. “I’m sorry for not—”

“Just shut up and listen,” she said. “I’ve had cancer three times. Once in the lung, once in the large intestine, once in the skin on my legs.” Charcharias gestured to her chest. “I got rid of these when I was eighteen, because it was going to happen eventually anyway, so why not get that out of the way.” She suddenly sagged, like that outburst had taken all of the air out of her. The tent became heavy with silence, so heavy that I couldn’t talk, and I could scarcely even breathe while I processed what she’d said.

Amina’s eyes rose up to meet mine. Those huge blue-grey eyes didn’t look sad, just tired. “Emma? I’m thirty-two years old. Eventually it’s going to happen in an organ that they can’t just cut out of me.”

“And you think that my… ability will be able to fix you?”

She shrugged. “Your élan vital is strong enough to fix a bullet wound in under a minute. I barely even understand what it can do, or what it really means about you, or where it comes from, or how it works, or any of that. But, yes, if I could figure out how to harness even one one-hundredth of what you have, I might live long enough to see my daughter grow up.”

“You have a daughter?” I said quietly.

“I do, yes,” she said. “Though even when I was in Amrinval, I barely got to see her, or my wife, seeing as I was practically living on the Halflance estate. Her name is Constance.”

I started drifting towards the tent flap, slowly processing what she’d told me. “I already said I’d let you do your tests when we got back to Amrinval,” I said. “That stands. I’m sorry I didn’t notice earlier that this was personal…”

“No, no, that’s not right,” she said, shaking her head. “I’ve had a lot of time to think about this, and I’m not the right person. I wanted to fight the problem head-on, even if that wouldn’t lead to an actual solution.”

“That’s… yeah, I know that feeling a little bit,” I said, remembering back to Lorraine Leyrender’s laboratory.

“I know someone. Her name is Dr. Tolva. She’s the smartest woman I know, and an expert on electrobiology out in a university town called New Alderburg. If arrangements could be made for you to stay with her… there’s nobody who could do better work with your ability than her, not even me.”

I rested my hand on the inside of the tent flap. “Alright. Once this is all over, Dr. Tolva in New Alderburg.” I pushed partway through the entrance, the cold mountain air hitting like a wave. “And tell Constance I said hello.”

“I will,” Amina said.

I went back to my personal tent.