Page 88 of The Moon Blessed King
‘Would you bring someone back?’ she asks him then. ‘If you had the power to do it. If you knew what it could mean for everyone else? Or would you let someone die, even if you could have saved them?’
Lio doesn’t meet her eyes. Perhaps it is too difficult a question to answer. But she dared to ask it anyway. And when he responds, she knows it is an answer he does not want to give. ‘I’d let them die,’ he says. ‘We can’t save everybody. All life is sacred…but all things die. And sometimes…people die for a reason. And it’s better if they do.’
Elena calls her name.
Fen swallows. She says, ‘Wash your hands and face,’ as she straightens her spine. Tilts her chin up. Prepares herself for her fate.
‘Would it even help?’ he asks.
‘It’ll help clean the dirt off your skin,’ she replies. They are trying to fistfight the gods, and they are losing, but at least he will be clean.
Fen weaves her way through packs of patients and their care-givers. Sick civilians who never asked for this, and who lie without any kind of care or assistance because theirs is a country that has relied on magic and miracles instead of science and themselves.
She steps over bodies and mutters an apology as she knocks into Gerai and Angelo on her way past. They have finally come to some form of agreement between themselves – they’ve been successfully healing twelve patients a day for the past three days. They’ll be leaving soon, to the Crownlands most likely, to help alleviate the suffering there and give room for the new recruits to take their place. Fen wonders if it matters that more people in Crowen will die in their absence. She wonders how any of them are going to live with themselves after this, when they think back to everyone they could have saved but didn’t.
Elena waves her arm in the air as Fen draws near, flagging her down as quickly as she can. Kassandra lies on the ground at Elena’s side.
She is sick.
Terribly sick. Pustules and black patches mar her fair skin. When she breathes, her throat squeezes painfully on air trying to reach her lungs. Her hands shake. Her face is blotchy, and blood dribbles from her nostrils, bursts free from veins and vesicles.Too much blood, Fen thinks wearily as Elena tries to drain some of the excess from a cut on Kassandra’s arm. It will not be enough. Fen knows what she needs to do next. Knows, too, that none of this is going to be easy. ‘She said she knows you?’ Elena says as Fen settles in at Kassandra’s side and takes her patient’s hand.
‘Yes…Elena…can I talk to her alone, please?’ Fen murmurs.
‘Shall I get Cieli?’ Elena asks her, easily and freely.
‘No,’ Fen replies. ‘We’ll be fine…but…you should see Lio first. He just arrived. There are things he needs to tell you.’ Elena looks between them, uncertain but accepting. She stands and leaves, and when she goes, Fen feels the heavy burden of fate on her shoulders.
Fen wonders how Hamad got her this sick this fast. If he had done a bastardization of what Elena had been trying to do with the inoculations – injecting some ill person’s matter directly into her skin but offering no form of immunity or relief in turn, ensuring that the plague dug deep into Kassandra’s body and would never again let her go.
‘Hurts,’ Kassandra whispers. Her voice warbles brokenly from her swollen throat.
‘I know,’ Fen says. She has no idea what it must feel like to be as sick as Kassandra is, but she can sense the pain receptors that are working at maximum capacity. She can identify the triggers in Kassandra’s brain that are panicking with an overextended influx ofwarning, warning, warning. Danger. Illness. Wrong.
‘An – Aniya—’
Her daughter. She wants her daughter. Fen doesn’t know where she is, but she is certain: wherever it is, Aniya is safe. Fen squeezes Kassandra’s hand. ‘Do you still trust me?’ she asks. She made a promise. She made so many promises. But this one, this one is more important than all the others.
Kassandra cannot speak the words. Her head jerks in a pained nod. ‘You need to die,’ Fen says. ‘You need to die for this to work.’ She doesn’t have time to explain. Doesn’t even fully know if she can do what needs to be done. ‘I’ll take care of your daughter. I’ll make sure that she gets to where she needs to be. But you can’t be there when I do.’
Kassandra’s lips tremble; her whole body shudders. Limbs jerk as nerves misfire and blood pulses too strongly through veins too small for the excess. ‘Trust me. Trust me that I will do right…for both of you.’ Kassandra gasps. Her spine arches.
Fen stays at Kassandra’s side; she watches as black blood bruises beneath her skin, forcing its way free from the corners of her eyes and her nose. Kassandra chokes on it, gags. Fen feels everything. Kassandra’s body failing. Her soul, nestled in the pit of her chest, clinging to all of the excess life that floods through her body – desperate not to go. She imagines, for a moment, a vision of the goddess Death. A vision where Death kisses Kassandra on the lips and pulls back with her breath filled with Kassandra’s soul.
Elena resurrected someone once. Not with magic, not with any gift of the gods. Just with her hands at their breast, pumping her arms into the patient’s chest and breathing her own life into the patient’s body until they coughed and sputtered and once more came alive. It was the most astonishing thing Fen had ever seen. And as she imagines Death, stealing the very breath that keeps Kassandra alive, she thinks too of something else:Is it truly a resurrection if the soul never leaves?
Can you truly die if your soul never wanders far?
‘Trust me,’ Fen whispers once again. She continues to squeeze Kassandra’s hand. She breathes in long and steady, and she thinks:Enough. She has suffered more than enough.
And she wants, so very badly, for everything tostop.
No more pain signals in the brain. No more messages sent from one organ to another telling things to reproduce on and on and on and on. No more heartbeat pounding endlessly out of control. No more stomach acid building up with no place to go. She wants it to end. Needs it to. This isn’t healing. It is killing. Killing in its finest form, slaughtering all that is evil so that only that which is good will remain, and yet knowing, more than anything else, that it is Death herself who holds her hand through it all.
Elena taught them. Her and Cat both. So much more than anything she had ever taught her burgeoning corps of nurses. Cat was better at it. More intuitive. He can stop signals in the brain, remove anxiety, terror, fear. Hestopsprocesses from taking place…and if he does that, is that not healing? And if it is healing, can she not do it too?
She, who has only ever been good at healing that which has already succumbed to death.
This death in particular must be believable, Fen thinks, squeezing Kassandra’s hand tight as she wills every process, every bit of excess to bend as they bend to a Reaper’s touch alone.Stop. Just stop.
