Ghosts of the Borderland Outtake: Part 4

[guardiansverse]

After a few more minutes of bliss, Lillen judged her clean enough for the tub. Stefie had run off and returned with a basin and a stool, and her mother sat down behind the tub with the basin on her knees, so that while Amika leaned back she could wash her hair in it. The touch of the hot water all over her skin felt to Amika like honey pouring into her veins, the sweetest of thick weights, slow and golden. She settled slowly, muscle by muscle unknotting, releasing her aches and pains into the water’s embrace. As she lay back, it felt as if the mountains had affixed a bar of ice and iron across her shoulders, and now the ice was melting, the iron inch by inch bending back into living, supple softness. Her body unclenched as though all of it had been a fist.

She let her head drop back and closed her eyes, heard Lillen hum as she gathered up her hair, Sylvie and Stefie whispering about ribbons and styles they might offer a princess. Bit by bit, the warmth was at last reaching her bones.

Something inside her shied to think of it, felt the hint of her body and mind return to their balance and twisted upon itself, as though insisting that some things were past being warmed and thawed and softened. In the heavy and velveteen dark, she ran mental hands along her roots, tried to brush them loose and lay them straight. She found the last vestiges that hooked, clinging, into the power of the borderland. They did not go easily: edges snapped, fragments burrowed, shrapnel of choices made that would linger as doubt, as temptation. She might never be entirely clean, down to her soul, of the use she had made of that power.

But while there was peace, perhaps for a little time…

Footsteps moved through the room, murmurs at the doorway. Lillen finished squeezing out Amika’s hair and rose from the stool, spoke low to her daughters, who quickly followed her in slipping out of the room. Let her rest, she heard Lillen say; but as soon as they were gone, their murmurs and movement, there was a thickness in her throat and a pressure behind her eyes. Some of it physical – without the borderland’s power coursing into her, her body was finding new complaints – but too much of it something more. All the comfort she was surrounded with, all the warmth and kindness, seemed suddenly to overwhelm. They had all tried so hard to make her clean…

“If you are going to cry, I can also leave,” Ranna quietly said.

She had taken Lillen’s place on the stool, had dragged it to the side of the tub so that she and Amika could look at each other: opening her eyes, Amika found her there, and did not know what to answer. She almost certain was going to cry. She tried to turn away and rub her eyes, to blame it on the bathwater or her exhaustion or whatever else there was that could justify tears after all she had done. But Ranna was looking at her closely and would not look away.

“I am sorry,” she whispered instead. “I have no right to it, after everything.”

Helpless now to do otherwise, she studied her sister-Guardian. Ranna looked hesitant, suspended on some edge: not one of suspicion, as she had been at the border, but something that made her own youth show, almost unguarded. Her hand hovered over the skin of Amika’s bare shoulder again. There was want there, and there was fear: to Amika’s eyes, faintly blurred, the fear of a tender touch meeting something sharp, or poisoned.

The hand stayed for a long moment, radiating the ghost of warmth.

“Sometimes I think I understand you,” Ranna said softly. “And then sometimes…”

She reached for the brush instead, and turned her attention to the heavy fall of Amika’s wet hair.

The bristles pulled through knots tangled knots, pulled at her skull for all of Ranna’s evident care; brought tears to her eyes in force, but Amika allowed those. She was clenching her jaw to restrain them when Ranna said: “It’s all right. I’d much rather see you cry than laugh along with your captain.”

It was strange; until that moment she stopped thinking of Samaren, or wondering how he was getting about chasing the frost from his blood. And yet once she did, something in her heartache shifted, seemed to find a new place where it could drain, and sink, and settle to slumber. She pictured him again as she had left him, in his utter exhaustion – spent to the marrow, for her sake – and thought, if all that power, all that bloodthirsty ferocity could rest…

She opened her eyes to Ranna. “Would you send someone to see – no, I will go myself.”

“Go where?”

“To see that he’s well.”

Ranna narrowed her eyes. She looked away.

The heat must have loosened Amika’s mind as well as her muscles, she thought, because she said, “I know you will never hate him any less. But he is my man.”

Ranna’s voice was dark. “He’s only on your side as much as he ever was on mine.”

“You haven’t seen him as I have.”

“What, tired? Hurt? I’ve seen him – “

“No – afraid.”

Schervo’s Land’s Own fell silent. Her hand dipped into the water, fingers twisting little eddies.

“I suppose I see what you’re doing,” she said at length.

I don’t, Amika thought, with a little too much honesty when turned on her own very tired self. But she did not think the tears would return. She swallowed and coughed faintly; Ranna gave her a sidelong look. But her only comment was a dry, almost amused, “maybe you should think about how well you are yourself, first. Remember that we’ll all still have to be diplomatic tomorrow.”

But that was tomorrow. In the meantime, Amika shook her head, and heard her sigh in resignation as Ranna took back the brush and redoubled her efforts to be gentle on her hair.




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