Her pain ...
I feel it. I feel it like it’s mine, and ithurts.
There’s little I can do. The elixir and wrappings will heal her injuries. It doesn’t seem to be doing much for the pain, though.
She winces again. Her lips part in a silent cry.
I don’t even know what I’m doing until I’m downstairs in the cook’s quarters. I chop up chocolate. I melt it down. I don’t think about all the reasons I shouldn’t care, because I do, and she’sbleeding, and in pain, and right now, I’ll do anything to bring her comfort.
This drink. It helps me. It—helped—me.
I portal back to my room and roughly hand her the mug. “Drink this.”
Slowly, tentatively, she takes it from me. Her chest. It has to be on fire. I don’t know how the pain alone hasn’t made her faint.
I don’t breathe as I watch her drink. I’m waiting for something. For what, I don’t know, until I watch her eyes flutter closed. Until I feel the airy surprise and chocolate-sweet flush of pleasure before it’s swallowed by another wave of pain.
She likes it.
She likes it too.
I don’t know why that inconsequential fact becomes everything, proof that perhaps we’re not so different and maybe she shouldn’t ever leave my room.
She drinks every drop, and then she frowns again. “Do you have something else for the pain? How about that Nightshade substance?” She thinks for a moment. “Nightbane?”
My blood runs cold.
Confusing, white-hot fury laces through me, mixed with fear.
“You will never know nightbane,” I say.
“Why not?”
“It’s a drug. It makes you the happiest you’ve ever been and takes away all suffering.”
She looks undeterred. “I want it.”
The fool. I have more concern for her own life than she does, and why is that? If she wants to be this foolish, I should let her. I should let herdie.
Even though I pose far more danger to her than the drug, I have an urge to make her understand, make her stay as far away from it as possible. “It kills you slowly, methodically, efficiently, until you die with a smile on your mouth. With continued use, nightbane is a death sentence, and everyone who takes it knows it.”
Finally, she looks dissuaded, and I breathe a little easier. “So why take it?”
I never understood myself, though now, I’m starting to. “I suppose they feel the pleasure ... however short-lived ... is worth it.”
She’s still on the floor. I curse the fact that I don’t have more furniture. Besides my bed, my room is mostly empty. Simple. I should do something about that. I sit down next to her.
She asks me why I don’t have anything stronger for pain, and I tell her the truth. What I learned as a child:
Pain can be useful.
It can be used to unlock deeper levels of ability. With the dreks and the scar, my pain has become an asset.
I continue telling her the truth. I continuetalking, and I’ve never shared this much about myself before, not with anyone. But I have the strange urge to distract her from the pain. And ... even stranger ... the urge for her to know me. Because then maybe she will let me know her.
“When I was seven, my training consisted of being cut and skinned until there was barely any flesh left on my back.”
Her eyes widen ... they are matched with a feeling I can taste.Concern. Not pity ...concern. Like perhaps she doesn’t hate me as much as she claims.
