I talked to her while I worked, whether her eyes were open or closed. “Did he ever feed you this disgusting swill? It tastes like the dirt under your nails, but it’s useful when the spirit has taken the same beating as the body and they have to heal together or not at all. He made it for me the same day I came to him, and it’s a wonder I didn’t run off as soon as I could stand. One other time, too—you’ve seen that scar that runs halfway around my back? A rock-targ bit me half in two, and had a good start on the second half when I managed to shove an arrow into it. But by then I had screamed and prayed and wet myself and fouled myself with such fear that sewing me up was meaningless by itself. If he hadn’t poured enough fasska down my throat to wash away Corcorua market, I might still be staring at his ceiling. It’s that good, this muck, if you can only keep it down.”
Lal said nothing. My eggshell of water did finally come to a boil, and I dumped the lichen scrapings into it and covered them with a broad leaf to hold in the heat. You have to steep fasska forever, or at least until you truly cannot endure the smell an instant more. The best thing then is to add two dried kirrichan leaves while it cools; somehow they tend to make the drink, which always remains silver-gray as a slug trail, a bit more palatable—but we were as short of those as of everything else but fish. Lal would have to take her healing raw, no help for it.
Strangely, frighteningly, she put up absolutely no resistance when I made her sit up and began tipping the stuff into her mouth. I expected her to spit it back out—to the side, if my luck held. I expected snarls, curses, kicks in the shins with those horn-hard feet. What I got was a Lal who swallowed the fasska obediently, with no more protest than an occasional cough; beyond the slightest flinching of her lips, she might have been drinking ice-vine tea or red ale. When it was gone, she closed her eyes again and lay back silently, and did not stir for the rest of the day.
I bathed and cleaned her as was necessary, washed myself in the river, slept a little, fished again, and spent most of the time in studying our one remaining possession. I had never seen such a boat before; indeed, it seemed more kite than boat to me. It cannot have been longer than twelve feet, and in its broadest section hardly as wide as I am tall; and finally it was nothing more than round and flat sticks fitted so tightly together that you could scarcely see the grooves between. Some of the sticks—the mast, for example—were actually a sort of hollow reed, and many must have telescoped to allow them to fit in a traveler’s pack. The wood itself was far lighter than any wood I knew; the sails were like silk, but not silk. Two people could have lifted the entire affair out of the water, but it was plainly made to carry one deadly passenger alone. I could not imagine how Lal had assembled it unaided, nor how we should manage the rest of our journey downriver—and just how far was that to be?—on a miniature that marvelously delicate. The sun slipped back down behind the mountains while I brooded on this, and the small breeze sharpened. Night comes early in the high country.
I have said that Lal did not move all day, unless I moved her, neither before drinking the fasska nor after. When I lay down by her that second night, she was unchanged: heart steady, breath even enough, but her body distinctly colder than before. The firm pulse lied—she was slowing, she herself, in a way that I could do absolutely nothing about, if the drink could not. Her skin felt terribly dry, like the husk of an insect, and there was a sweet, faraway fragrance to it that alarmed me even more than the coldness. Someone’s childhood may perhaps smell like that, in memory, or someone’s dreams of an afterlife. Lal-Alone, Sailor Lal, does not.
But in the night, sometime after midnight, she began to turn fitfully, waking me, and to mutter words in the language of her long private songs. Her voice grew louder, sounding frightened at first and then increasingly angry, and she struggled in my arms with her eyes staring. I held her as strongly and as carefully as I could, fearful that she would do one of us an injury if I let her go. For all that, she scratched my face more than once and bit her mouth bloody, crying out to someone whose name I did not know. That was nothing at all; what made it difficult to hold on was that the strange new scent of her body had become as unbearably sweet as the fasska’s smell was vile.
Then the sweat came. Between one moment and the next, the cold dry fever had broken, and she was running with ordinary human sweat, soaking, sluicing with it, gasping and crying like a newborn, her head thrown back as though she were bathing under a waterfall. The drink had done its work—her smell was her own again, spicy and tart, almost bitter, her own, and there was Lal, slipping through my damp grip to sit up and announce shakily, “My swordcane smells of fish guts.”
I had set it beside her, like a familiar toy, in case she woke. Now I gaped at her as she sniffed the thing a second time, made a face, and tried the blade against her thumb. Instantly she rounded on me—naked, shivering, barely able to hold herself erect—demanding fiercely, “What have you been doing with it? You’ve bloody ruined it, do you know that? Damn you, Soukyan, you’ve ruined my sword!”
I took it out of her hand—already feeling her strength returning as she resisted me—and wrapped the entire sail around her to keep her from a chill. She struggled and swore, but I made her lie back down and sat by her, saying, “I needed an edge. Your sword was all we had.”
“Edge? Edge? Do you know how long it took me to put that edge on that blade? I’ll never be able to get it decently sharp again! What possessed you, what were you using it for, chopping stove logs?” Weak as she yet was— once she was down, she could barely lift her head to rail at me, and from time to time her voice cracked into inaudibility—she was also angrier than I had ever seen her. “Marinesha would have known better—Shadry would have known better!”
“Shadry and Marinesha didn’t have to feed you and physic you,” I said. “I did, and I used what there was. If you hadn’t left our packs behind—”
“I had to kill a man, build a boat, and save your stupid, pointless life! That stupid raft was about to catch fire, sink, I didn’t know when—I didn’t know if you were alive or dead, I wasn’t going to waste time hauling those bloody packs to the boat! He kept saying, ‘It’s burning, it’s burning.’” Her voice did not break then, nor were there tears in her eyes, but I felt as strange and uncertain as I had when she called me by my true name. She was so angry at me, and she looked eleven years old.
I told her what had happened since she pulled me out of the river. She listened very quietly, never taking her eyes from my face. The sweat had stopped running—even her hair was drenched and her small ears dripping—and I realized for the first time how much weight she had lost in only two days. When I finished, she looked at me for a moment longer, then shook her head and blew her breath out softly. “Well,” she said. “Well. Thank you.”
“You remember nothing of this?” I asked. “Not even the fasska? I can’t imagine that anyone could ever forget having drunk fasska.”
“I remember nothing,” Lal said flatly. “I don’t like that.” She was silent again for a time before she smiled, and now she looked easily fifteen. She said, “But whatever you gave me, it was the right thing. I don’t know whether it saved my life, but it brought me back from”— she faltered briefly“—I think from a place where a gardener’s rhyme would not have reached me. Thank you, Soukyan.”