A ruse demands painful sacrifice from both Amika and Samaren (post-GotBL) - Part II

[guardiansverse]

When she saw the first lightning strike over the city jail, Amika had started counting seconds. She got nowhere: the heart of the storm was directly over the city, and the thunder followed instantly. But she stayed within the counting, breaths, minutes, looking out through the safehouse’s one narrow window where it showed cobblestones and the feet of passers-by running home from the downpour. The glass was murky and the night outside deep and roaring with rain. She could not see the city jail from here or what the strike might have done, nor did she truly know how long she would have to wait. She had nothing but trust, and trust, she thought, ought to have been easier.

She made a circuit of the space, little as there was to it. One long, crowded room lit by a handful of stubby candles. A cot. A crude table. More a pit than a fireplace. Land’s Own Guardian, and this was where she was doing her dealings, in deep concealment, in the night. Waiting for a man whose conviction, in this particular instance, had been false, but whose punishment – in full truth –

The knock on the door – more a scratching – startled her. She scrambled to open the lock and latch, opened a crack to meet the dark eyes in the darkness beyond before flinging the door open.

Samaren stood braced against the doorframe, breathing hard, drenched to the bone and dripping rainwater tinged with red. He had the look of a wild animal fled from its cage. For a moment she saw them as an outsider would see: the savage creature come to claim the noble maiden in hiding, for his dark revenge for his hurts and who knew what else. The next moment he took two steps in, stumbled, and half fell into her barely prepared arms. She caught him, but he weighed more than she remembered, or perhaps was leaning on her more heavily, and so they both almost went down.

Urgency, and the energy released when tension snapped gave her strength, and strength bred impatience. “Did all go to plan?” she pressed even as she pulled him up, as they navigated their way to the cot, leaving a wet red trail. “Did you have to breach the gate?”

Her palm briefly settled on his back as they struggled for balance, and he growled at the touch and straightened under his own power, shaking her off. “Yes. There’s quite a riot down there.”

“Was anyone hurt?”

“I killed two prisoners and one of the guards, stabbed another through the gut taking his weapon.” He tossed a bayonet to the floor, and collapsed down onto the cot, heavily on his stomach with face buried in one arm. “They were in the way.”

Amika bit down on her admonishments and harder on her guilt. They had known and accounted for the possibility. There was a greater plan and greater stakes. Sun save her, but now the escape would look all the realer.

“It’s done.” She went to prod the firepit into a brighter life. Summer had been warm, but the storm brought a wet chill into the little room below the street level, and now they were enclosed with it.

Samaren didn’t respond, only lay breathing slowly. The rain had pasted his shirt to his back, showed the pattern beneath the cloth of haphazard bandaging shifted and undone in places, and the whole affair soaked crimson. She had given clear instruction that he be properly tended to – we are not beasts, she had said – but was not altogether surprised at the sight.

She had accounted for this possibility, as well. The table had been laid out in preparation. Now she pulled a stool between it and the cot, sat down, and folded her hands in her lap as though that would steel them. Accounting and preparation were excellent matters of theory. This entire plan had, in theory, been sound...

“Lie still,” she told him with as much firmness as she could muster. He opened one eye and tilted his head to glance back at her, curiously without suspicion. She swallowed hard, and again – knowing he was watching as she did – and picked up the scissors from the table.

He kept watching as she cut through his shirt. “Have you ever done this before, doma?”

“What do you think?” She pulled at blood-heavy fabric with gritted teeth.

“I thought perhaps in the war.”

“We will not talk about the war, Captain.” The war had been constantly on her mind since she had called it back to memory when she had to strike the first blow to him. Her breathing stuttered, face working against all her best efforts, as she moved on to cut through the bandages. Samaren shifted very slightly, a movement so minute she almost didn’t recognize it as a wince. His back when she revealed it was a ruin, a mess of welts and cuts caked with half-congealed blood. She had seen much worse wounds, in the war, but few uglier ones. “I – I will need to clean this.”

“In Ilyiga it was a mercy, flogging. We gutted deserters, or if we wanted them alive, cut off their ears and nose.” He spoke in a steady ramble as she soaked a rag in hot water, began by patting gingerly at the edges of the crisscrossed rakes. “I know that in the revolution, you Hyemi also – hsst! It stings, damn your eyes!”

“It was your idea,” she snapped, quite literally up to her elbows in blood. “All I required was an excuse for you to defect. You said that it must be a show.”

“For us two, when all the continent knows – gah! Are you trying to scrape more of my skin off?”

Amika glanced down at her hand. She had been clutching the rag with bloodless fingers.

She cast it aside and picked up a fresh one, forced herself to look closely at the wounds as she wiped them clean. He had endured a hundred lashes without as much as a whisper of discomfort. That had been for the crowd; for the world; for his Centre. Here, with her, he had nothing to prove and no challenge to strive under. She breathed in and forced herself further, to slow down, to take care. “Well. Between this and your escape tonight, I think we have spectacle enough.”

“More than enough for me. But it had to be your own hand.”

At the whip, of course; but now, this... “I will not be much longer. But the salve will sting worse, I think.”

“They always do.” He turned slightly to angle his back more toward her and his face further away. Both his eyes were now shut. Not the soul-deep focus he had worn at the post, but a look she knew well nonetheless, the calm look of a man familiar enough with pain to no longer find it worth commenting on.

She wondered when one gained this familiarity, how long it took. As she finished wiping off the blood and picked the jar of salve up from the table, she thought, through all her efforts, about the war. What she would have given then, what all of Hyem would have given to have him laid out like so, wounded and suffering, at her mercy – and great Sun, but she had thought so much more of mercy back then. What she would have given, there when they faced each other a final time, for this blood in repayment. For her comrades, for her friends. For Festus Detrich, that death that had cracked a nation’s soul, as though it could have cleansed her own hands of their share in the deed. Instead she had chosen to take something else. I will be the weapon you need. Chosen to take his word that she would need a weapon.

She spread the salve with her fingers, though she had to bite the inside of her lip to make herself touch the raw gouges. It smelled of beeswax and something herbal and tangy, and made her skin tingle; she could only imagine what it felt like to have it rubbed into open wounds. Samaren kept his silence, breathing deep and steady through a clenched jaw. His fists tangled tightly in the cot’s thin blanket. She could feel his racing heartbeat through the heat of the raw flesh. If she pushed her fingers in just a little deeper...

“Did you want me to hurt you?” she murmured.

He did not open his eyes. “Did you not want to hurt me?”

How long have you waited to do this? “I said that we will not bring up the war.”

“It wasn’t me who did,” he said low.

Amika’s gut churned. She jerked her fingers through a fresh rag, wiping off salve and blood and leaving her own hands feeling raw.

“You will need to sit up for me to bandage you.” She turned around to put her attention to the strips of cloth ready on the table. “Can you manage it?” A foolish question: however much he was in pain, he was clearly not weak. But she had felt the need to ask. As an offer of – what? It was not her who needed to ask his forgiveness.

Samaren sat up with a low hiss, both palms flat on the cot to steady himself. Watched her lay out the bandaging, subtly taking in every move. She moved in to press the first pad to the wounds, felt his sharp intake of breath under her hand. He raised his arms to let her roll out and wrap the bindings, and she moved yet closer to tighten them, tucking the edges close to the skin. All in silence, in close rhythm, the pain between them as honour’s sword between two lovers.

Did you not want to hurt me? When was he more at her mercy – under the whip, or now?

The final bandage was wrapped and secure. She pulled at the edge of the bindings to test them, heard a half-stopped exhale escape him, not quite silent, and then a longer, draining one. His shoulders slumped, head dropped back, lips faintly open as he breathed deep and steady. There was a faint tremor in her own hands. She wrung them through the cloth, then plunged them into the water for her skin to flush and tingle with the heat.

She saw him gingerly reach behind him to touch the bandaging. “I did what I could. You know that I am no physician.”

“I’ve had worse wounds tended by worse hands.” He tried to offer one of his shrugs, shaking off anything and everything, but she made a warning sound as the gesture threatened to shift the wraps.

“And you have no fear of taking a fever?”

“I haven’t in twenty years. Strong Guardians rarely do.”

“It will scar,” she quietly said.

His face sealed for a drawn-out moment. He stared past her; at her; then finished the shrug, and said, “I suppose it should.”

Something in the tone of his voice, in that calm too decisive to be resignation, filled her with sudden sharp resentment. She watched him slowly lie back down, stiff and very careful on her bandages. With morning she would have to leave, to return to her house and her everyday duties and wait for word, that he was following the next stage of their plan, that their enemies were fooled and on their way to ruin. That there had been purpose to what she had done. What he had had done to him. What he had permitted her to do.

It had been his idea, the flogging. Nothing less would convince, had been his claim, that he had broken with her and, through the following night’s escape, that he was free of any grip that she may have had on his power. She had seen the logic. What was between them... from the outside, one saw only a close bond. The hooks were well hidden within the flesh.

Quietly, she asked: "What will you do if the healing goes badly?"

“It won’t.” He still sounded very calm.

“You are a man, Captain. Not a god.”

“I am a Guardian, and fortune favours the bold.” And now the calm rang with pleasure, that pleasure she had come to know so well, and certainly better than she had ever wanted to. To him regret was meaningless, and every risk worthwhile, so long as it tested a limit – his limit – and hers, now. How far, how deep. He had let her injure him hideously, before an exulting crowd, and his silent endurance had been a testament and a challenge. And now, under her tender hand, caring for those very wounds – was he challenging her now?

“Why must you always keep proving this?” she asked, choked with helplessness, wishing that she indeed had hurt him, could hurt him. Could sink the hooks deep enough and make him see and know pain as others knew it, as she knew it. “What have you to prove to me? I know what you can do. What you are. Why don’t you learn?”

He turned his face to her, a strange look, pulled suddenly into something almost like sadness. “Why don’t you?”

The question caught her off her guard, honest as it was: genuine, but not truly expecting an answer, and either way she had none to give. Nothing she could put between them now. Did you want me to hurt you?

“Sleep,” she said, hoarsely, softly; and as always, he obeyed.