I don’t know if I can trust him, but I’ll try anything that might help Wes, so I only watch as Buff grabs the snow and pats it on Wes’s stomach.
“We gotta get to the Red District,” I say. “There are healers there who know how to be discrete.”
“We can’t,” Skye says. “This ain’t our country. We hafta git back to the desert.”
“Trust me,” I say. “Healers first. Desert after. We’ll go together.”
Wilde steps forward, a wicked gash running from her ear to her chin. “He’s right, Skye. We all need help.”
Skye’s fierce brown eyes are uncertain for a moment, but then she nods, says, “Move out!”
Before we charge through the White District, I look back, wondering if, at any moment, a horde of guards will pour from the gate, descending upon us like a swarm of demons.
Instead, I see only one man, high atop the wall. He holds a child in his arms.
With a slow, drawn out motion, he slides his thumb across his throat.
And it’s hard to see, because it’s dark and snowflakes are falling, but I know…
I know.
It’s King Goff and he’s—he’s got—
He’s got Jolie.
And I don’t know if his death decree is meant for me or for her.
~~~
We run, walk, limp, hobble, and carry each other to the Red District.
It took every last bit of my self-control not to run back to the palace, to demand that Goff hand over my sister, to fight him and the rest of his guards, all of whom will be awake and called into action.
But if he hasn’t hurt Jolie yet, it’s unlikely he’ll hurt her now. He told me himself that he needs her, that she’s some special trade item, whatever that means. And Wes is in trouble now, so he has to be my top priority. But even as Buff and I struggle along, carrying him, watching him fight in and out of consciousness, babbling like our drug-plugged mother, Jolie’s all over my thoughts. She’s calling to me, asking me why—WHY?—why did you leave me behind when you were so close to finding me? I thought you loved me?
It’s all I can do to whisper, “I’m sorry,” and push onwards.
Although it’s the middle of the night when we reach the Red District, there’re lights on everywhere, music playing, men laughing. A man crashes through a swinging door, landing face first in a pile of snow. “And stay out, you drunk!” a gruff voice calls after him.
A door to our left creaks open and there’s Lola, looking as provocative as ever, something thin and silky tied up top and around her waist. “By the Mountain Heart,” she murmurs when she’s sees us leaving bloody footprints in the snow. She slinks back inside, slamming the door behind her.
Skye glances at me and I shrug. Just another normal night in this place.
“Turn here,” I say as we approach a cross road.
Around the bend we stop at the second building on the right. There’s no sign, no placard, not even something spray-painted on the wall to describe what’s here. You either know it, or you don’t. Thankfully, after Wes demanded that I never come home again looking like I’d been through a war, I found this place. They’ve stitched and bandaged me (and Buff too) up more times than I can count even with both shoes off and my toes warming in front of the fire.
“Here,” I say.
“Here?” Skye says.
I nod. She shrugs and pushes the metal door open, holding it for me and Buff.
We carry Wes inside.
It smells like ’quiddy and burnt ice powder inside, but it’s not an underground drug and booze house. The alcohol’s for sterilizing wounds and the burnt ice powder is a natural anesthetic, although I wouldn’t recommend using it for that purpose very often. As my mother has shown time and time again, it’s more addictive than a woman’s smile.
Maddy, the rough-edged woman who runs the joint, is sitting at the desk when we barge in. “Good Heart!” she exclaims. “Dazz?”
“Mads,” I say with a nod. “Wes needs urgent medical care. So do some of the others.” I wave a hand back at the ragtag group behind me. Her eyes widen. “All of us need treatment for one injury or another.”
“We’re all full up,” she says, frowning, her eyes jumping between Skye and Feve, who are standing next to me.
“Mads,” I say, not even attempting to keep the desperation out of my voice. “Please.”
“I don’t even know where these—these strange people come from,” she says, her eyes narrowing on Feve’s markings, which curl out from beneath his skins and around his neck.
“Fire country,” I say. “They come from fire country, and they need your help. I need your help.”
Every line in her face crinkles. “You got silver?” she asks.
“Nay,” I say, and I see her frown deepen. “I mean, not on us. But you know I’m good for it.”
“Ain’t got no silver, ain’t get no service,” she says crossing her arms.
My arms are burning from carrying Wes and all I want to do is collapse right here on her floor, refuse to move, force her to help us, but then Abe hobbles up next to me and says, “I got plenny of silver and yer icin’ gonna help us or so help me Mountain Heart, I will make the rest of yer days a livin’ chill, Woman!”
Well, Mads pretty much jumps into gear after that, yelling for all her healers to come to the front immediately and stop helping the drunks with bruised knees and even more bruised egos. At least ten women come out, all wearing less-than-clean aprons—which I expect at one time were as white as snow, but which are now a yellowish-reddish-brown—about one per each one of us, although those of us with minor injuries refuse treatment until Wes and Hightower and Circ and Abe are taken care of.
They usher us beyond the desk, through a door, and into a large room, full of beds. As it turns out, the place isn’t even close to “full up”, as Maddy said, and nearly every bed is empty. There are only two fellas being treated, each with similar looking head wounds that look suspiciously like what you might expect a gash from a shattered bottle over the head to look like. The way they’re glaring at each other, I suspect they hit each other at about exactly the same time. Well, Maddy tells them to get the chill out, and they do, pushing and shoving each other the whole way.
The rest of us get a bed. Hightower gets three, two side by side to accommodate his width, and one sideways along the bottom for his length. His feet still stick off the end. He wiggles his toes and grunts. The three healers that surround him are scratching their heads and wondering aloud at how they’re going to treat his many wounds. I also hear them say something about whether Tower might be descended from the Yags.
Abe’s in a bed of his own, yelling orders and curses at the two healers that look scared to be treating him.
Siena opts out of her bed, standing by Circ’s side, holding his hand, saying something that makes him laugh and then wince when one of the healers does something to his injured leg.
Feve skips the bed, too, standing by the door, his eyes dark, as if the king himself might come through. Mountain Heart help Goff if he does.
Buff, now naked from the waist up, sits next to Wilde, chattering away as a healer looks at a dark and mottled bruise that covers half his abdomen. She looks amused, but her eyes keep flicking around at the others, like she’s concerned for them too, while another healer bandages her head.
Skye and I stand across the foot of the last bed, where Wes lies twitching in a fitful sleep. Every few minutes he moans.
“How’d this happen?” Maddy asks, breaking her own number one rule: don’t ask questions. But this is a night for rule-breaking.
“I don’t know,” I say. “One minute he was there, fighting alongside us, and the next he was missing. And when we found him he was like this. Did you see anything, Skye?”
Skye shakes her head and Maddy stares at her for a good, long while, so long that Skye flashes her a warning frown. “I’m sorry,” Maddy says. “I’ve just never seen anyone from…”
“From fire
country,” Skye finishes. “Well, truth be told, until a few days past, most of us ain’t never seen any of yer kind either.”
“Please, Mads. Can you just focus on my brother?” I plead.
The other two healers are using small knives to cut away Wes’s shirt. At least their instruments look clean and rust-free, I think.
When they peel away the fabric, I feel a shockwave of fear lock my bones up tight. There’s so much blood that we can’t even see the wound. Despite the snow, which is red and melting, the blood’s pouring outta him like a bubbling spring, soaking his pants and the bed and the healers’ hands, which are dabbing at his stomach with thick cloths that fill up with blood in an instant.
“Pressure!” Maddy says and one of the healers starts pushing on his gut with both hands, while Maddy and the other healer finish cleaning up the blood. “We need more hands!” she says, and one of the healers who was helping Buff rushes over. “Get anesthetic, pain killers, a sewing kit, and more freezin’ cloths,” she orders. “The good stuff. Only the good stuff,” she adds.
The healer runs to a cabinet and flings the door open, scattering vials of liquids, which shatter like crystal on the floor, spilling their contents. She ignores the broken glass, rummages through the box, gathers the desired items and brings them back over, setting them on a table next to the bed.
When Maddy says “More hands!” again, Feve wanders over.
“I can help,” he says.
“You know about healing?” Maddy asks.
“Yes. I have herbs,” he says. “They’ll help with infection and pain.”
“Whatever you’ve got, we’ll take it,” she says.
Feve reaches inside his thick coat and extracts a small sachet.
At the same time, the assistant healer grabs the cloths and helps to wipe away the blood, while Maddy uncorks a vial of a clear liquid, tilts my brother’s head, and forces it down his throat. He chokes, gasps, but she holds his head back, pinches his nose, and the liquid goes down. Then she opens another glass bottle, selects a needle and thread from a small box, and wedges herself between two of the other three healers.
“Herbs,” Maddy says.
Feve pours out the contents of a small skin, sprinkling black and green flecks onto my brother’s torn skin. Are they magic from fire country?
“Would you shut up!” Maddy says sharply in my direction. “He can’t hear you anyway.”
It’s only then that I realize that I’m rubbing Wes’s leg, saying, “It’s gonna be okay, it’s gonna be okay,” over and over again, even while I’m watching them try to save him. I stop, noticing that Skye’s not across the table anymore, but next to me, a hand on my back, looking up at me.
“Yer right,” she says. “It’s gonna be okay.”
Chapter Twenny-Seven
But neither Skye nor I was right. We never were. Nothing is okay. Nothing will ever be okay.
Wes died that night from an axe wound to the stomach. They worked on him for three, four hours, dabbing away the blood and stitching him up, both stuff on the inside and the skin on the outside. By the end of it my legs were shaking and I could barely feel Skye’s hand on my back, her other hand gripping mine.
The blood was gone. He was whole again. And then he took his last breath.
I collapsed, fighting all the way to the floor even with Skye trying to hold me up. She lay down with me, curled up, her arm around me, holding me, as I sobbed and shook.
Sobbed and shook.
Now I’m all cried out, torn and broken on the bed that Buff and Feve carried me to. Skye’s never left my side, not once, but even her caring can’t bring my brother back. I didn’t even get to say goodbye.
And it was my plan—my stupid freezin’ dimwitted plan that caused it.
So my head’s down, my face pressed flat against the bed, as tight and low as I can make it. I tried to get lower twice, attempting to throw myself off the bed and onto the floor, but Skye wouldn’t let me. She held me up, her strength like a rock, bearing all the weight of my body and my grief in her arms. Then she rolled me back on, where I am now.
A few of the others, those able to walk—Buff, Siena, Circ with Siena’s help, Wilde—have come over to offer me words of sorrow, how they wish it hadn’t happened, how they’re sorry. But none of that’ll make things right, or bring Wes back.
I wish for more tears, a whole lake of them, enough to make the sum of my sorrow worthy of my brother, of the man that he was. But try as I might, I can’t squeeze one more out, my eyes burning with salt and fatigue and despair.
When Skye pushes onto the bed and right up next to me, I finally sleep.
Chapter Twenny-Eight
I need to take a break from my brain, but every time I try to push my thoughts away, they come roaring back all the harder, pushing against my skull like they’re trying to burst out, flying away on wings of sadness and winds of ache.
I’ve been awake for at least an hour, but I haven’t moved, haven’t opened my eyes. I don’t want anyone to know I’m awake, because I can’t take their sorrys and regrets any more than I can take the awful memories that my brain is spinning around.
Jolie needs you.
Wes is dead.
Jolie’s not.
Wes is.
Jolie.
Oh Jolie, Jolie—are you there? Are you really in the palace or did I dream up Goff holding you high on the wall?
With questions lingering still in my mind, I open my eyes to the sound of voices. Abe’s, harsh and definitive, rises above the others.
“You can do what you want, but I fer one ain’t goin’ back to that place,” he says. “Hightower neither. King Goff’ll roast us alive.”
Skye, Siena, Circ, Wilde, and Feve stand in a semicircle, watching the argument.
“They’ve got Dazz’s sister,” Buff says. “He’s just lost his brother, if we can…if we can only get her…”
“Good luck with that,” Abe says.
“I’ll go on my own if I have to,” Buff says and I see him cross his arms across his chest. “Is anyone else with me?”
Silence. There are quick glances between the people of the Tri-Tribes.
Wilde says, “We’ve talked it over…”
Skye scrapes a foot on the floor, looking down the whole time. I notice she’s shaking her head slightly, as if she doesn’t necessarily agree with the decision that’s been made.
“…and we think it best to return to fire country, to gather as many able-bodied men and women as we can, and to come back in force.”
“Nay,” I croak. I intend it as a shout, a cry of defiance, but it comes out all garbled and raspy. When everyone turns to look at me, I say it again, even softer. “Nay.”
Buff strides over. “I’m going with you,” he says. “We’re going to get Jolie. We’ll break down the gates and kill every one of Goff’s men, and then the king himself.”
I smile, my lips dry and chapped. “Yah. We will,” I say, clasping his outstretched palm. “Raising chill and kicking arse. Like always.”
“Like always,” he says.
“No,” says a voice from behind him. Buff moves aside to reveal Skye, who’s moved within a few steps of my bed. In my mind flashes memories: we strain through the bars, touching each other’s arms, desperately trying to lock lips; she brushes past me in the dungeons, so close I could touch her, if I’d only reached out; her warmth against me, her arm around me, providing an alternative to my grief. “You need to come with us,” she says, and the memories come crashing down like a fallen star.
“We’re going after my sister,” I say, my voice strengthening. I sit up, swing my feet over the side, plant them firmly on the floor. “With or without you.”
Our eyes lock and we’re both fighting it. The need we felt in the dungeon. Amidst everything—all the turmoil, the strife, the death—still there, pulling, pulling, banging, crashing through everything we say, everything we do, everything we want, like an avalanche, an unstoppable force of natur
e. But I fight it and I can see in her fathomless brown eyes, she’s doing the same. Me with thoughts of saving my sister and avenging my brother’s death, and her with doing right by her people, both of her sisters, one who’s alive and one who might be.
“Don’t,” she says.
I want to give her the option to come with us, but I can’t. I can’t ask that of her when it’s suicide, when it’s crazy. When it’s what I have to do.
“I can’t,” I say.
She turns and walks back to her people.
~~~
Buff and I know as well as anyone that we need to let things cool down a little before we go back to the palace.
So that leaves us to escort the others to the border, where we’ll bid them farewell. Each of them—save for Feve—has already promised me multiple times that they’ll return with many warriors. Wilde even offered her own promise, and I almost believe it coming from her. I thank them and smile, when in my heart I know that by then it’ll probably be too late.
Abe and Hightower have the worst injuries and will stay at Maddy’s for a while longer. Before we leave, I stand between their beds. “Thank you,” I say to both of them, my head bouncing back and forth. “For doing what you did.”
Abe sighs, opens his mouth, says something I’d never expect him to say in a million years. “I hate that bastard, King Goff.”
“But you’re his—”
“Slave?” Not what I was going to say. “Look, kid,” Abe says, “I know you think we’re the king’s evil little helpers and all that, but that’s not really us. We do what we’re told because the king’s had leverage over us from the start. He had my wife, Dazz.”
I can’t help raising my eyebrows, both because Abe called me by my real name and because he’s not who I thought he was. Not even close. Then I realize: He had my wife.