“No!” the girl screamed. She jumped toward the chasm as if she would throw herself into it, but Damien grabbed her by the neck of her shirt and pulled her back. “No!” She struggled blindly against his confining grasp, as if somehow by doing so she was also fighting Death. Bits of rainbow light swirled about her as she cried out to Hesseth, screaming words Damien didn’t understand—rakhene words?—hysterical in her shock, in her grief. Numbly he let her rage. She was doing it for both of them, voicing the horror of this loss better than he ever could.
Hesseth. She was gone. The Wasting had killed her. She had been by his side for so long now that it seemed impossible that he would never see her again. Tears ran down his face as the loss of it—the terrible, fearsome loss of it—hit home. For a moment he envied Jenseny the freedom of childhood, which permitted her to rant and rave with total abandon; all he could do was lower his head, his whole body shaking, and let the tears come.
After a time the girl’s struggles weakened, and she fell sobbing to her knees. He drew her to him then, gently, into his arms. She resisted at first, then clutched at him desperately, burying her face in his bloodied shirt and sobbing uncontrollably. Did she smell faintly of Hesseth? Was that possible? He lowered his face to her hair and for a long time just held her. The two of them alone in the Wasting.
In the end it was the pain in his shoulder and the hot cuts across his stomach that reminded him they needed to move. Softly, ever so softly, he whispered, “Jenseny. We can’t stay here.”
She drew back from him; her expression was fierce. “We can’t leave her!”
“Jenseny, please—”
“We can’t leave her here!”
He held her out at arm’s length, so that she was forced to look at him. “Jenseny, listen to me. Hesseth is gone now.” He said it as gently as he could but, oh, how the words hurt! He could see her flinch as he voiced them and she shook her head wildly as if somehow that would make the fact untrue . . . but she knew. She knew. “Her soul is free. All that’s down there is empty flesh. The part you loved, the part that loved you . . . she’s back with her people now. What you saw down there was just a . . . a container. She doesn’t need it anymore.”
“She left,” the girl gasped hoarsely. “She left us.”
“Oh, God.” He drew her to him and held her tightly, so tightly that there would be no room for grief or loneliness or any other source of darkness in that tiny, frightened soul. “She didn’t want to go, Jenseny. She was trying to protect us. She didn’t want anything to hurt you, not for all the world.” He blinked fresh tears from his eyes as he stroked her hair gently, softly. “She loved you so much,” he whispered.
Suddenly faintness welled up inside him. He forced himself to push the girl away and for a moment just sat there, trying not to lose consciousness. Then, when the world seemed steady once more, he pulled open his shirt front.
Bloody strips parted to reveal a torso that had been ripped and torn in at least a dozen places; his chest and stomach were coated with blood, and his pants were soaked with it. As if in confirmation of the sight a fresh wave of pain washed over him, and its force was such that he nearly doubled over and vomited onto the lava.
“God.” He tried to work a Healing to close up the wounds, but the fae was slippery, blood-slick, and it defied him. He drew in a shaky breath and tried it again—and this time there was a response, he could feel the earth-power pricking his skin as the torn cells healed, the gashes filled in, the pain receded. When he was done, all that was left was an ache in his chest, a faint echo of the pain that had been. And an emptiness inside him that no mere Working could heal.
She was watching him with wide, frightened eyes. Calm at last, as if the sight of his wounds had scared her back to sanity. She could have lost us both, he thought. Maybe that just hit her.
“Come on,” he whispered. “We have to get moving.”
He tried not to think about Hesseth as he helped the child to her feet. Tried not think about how vital and alive she had been a mere hour ago. How much she had gone through to come to this place only to be killed by beasts—by beasts!—at the very threshold of victory. He tried not to think about all those things, because when he did his eyes filled with tears and his throat grew tight and he found it hard to walk. And they had to keep walking no matter what, he and the child both. Otherwise the trees would have them.
Miles. Hours. He worked a Locating to find them another island, but no Working could bring it closer to them. Step by step he forced himself to keep moving, and when the girl grew too tired or frightened or numb with grief to walk they took a brief rest—never too long, lest the trees reach out to them—and they drank sparingly from their dwindling supply of water, and swallowed a few mouthfuls of dry food. It had no taste. The fact of Hesseth’s death had leached all color from the world, all smells, all flavor. They marched on a black plain into a gray sky, and even when the tidal fae gathered around Jenseny to sketch a fleeting image of the rakh-woman before her eyes, its work was rendered in shades of slate and granite and mist.
It was well past noon when they reached their haven. This island was a sharp slab that thrust up through the lava flow at such a steep angle that they had to circle nearly all the way around it before they found a place where they could climb. On its south side the slab had shattered and fallen, leaving a pile of rubble that could serve as a functional, if precarious, staircase.
When at last they reached a resting spot—a wide ledge some ten feet down from the island’s highest point—Damien felt the raw grief of the day’s experience finally overwhelm him. He let it. The girl collapsed on the granite shelf—safely back from the edge, he saw to that—and sobbed wildly, giving vent to all the misery and the fear that she had been fighting for hours. He let her. He had seen enough grief in his time to know that this, too, was part of the healing. No wound could close until it had been properly drained.
At last, softly, he spoke her name.
At first she didn’t seem to hear him. Then, seconds after he had spoken, she looked up at him. Her eyes were red and swollen and her whole face was wet with tears. Shaking, she wiped a sleeve across her nose as she looked at him, waiting to hear what he had to say.
“I’m going to say a prayer for Hesseth,” he told her. “It’s a very special prayer that we say when someone dies. Normally-” The words caught in his throat suddenly and for a moment he couldn’t speak. “Normally we say it when we bury people, but sometimes the people we love die when they’re far away, or something happens to a body so that we can’t get to it . . . like with Hesseth. So we just say it when we can, because God will hear it anywhere.” He gave that a minute to sink in, then told her, very softly, “I’d like you to do it with me.”
For a moment she didn’t answer. Then, in a hoarse whisper, she asked him, “What is it?”
He drew in a deep breath, “We tell God how much we loved Hesseth, and how sorry we are that she’s gone. And then we talk about the good things she did, and how much she cared for all of us, and we ask God to please take care of her, and see that she gets back to her people, and to see that her soul is surrounded by the souls of those she loved . . . That’s all,” he said hoarsely. “It’s just a . . . a way of saying good-bye.” He held out a hand to her. “Come on. I’ll lead you through it.”
She didn’t move at first. The look in her eyes was strange, and at first Damien attributed it to her fear of his Church. For a brief moment he wondered if he had chosen badly, if the offer of healing he had intended might not hurt her more.
But then she whispered, with tears in her voice, “After we do it for Hesseth, then we . . . can we please . . . say one for my father?”