Strong, strong suspension of disbelief at points is heartily recommended. It's been a very long time since I've perused these books.
In any case, without further ado:
Seven Steps
by Mana Angel
Chapter the First: The End
The girl doesn't realize she's fallen unconscious until she blinks awake, managing to stagger to her feet after a few nauseous minutes where her center of gravity flatly refuses to establish itself. Not much time has passed, if the sun's position is any guess, but on a battlefield, a few minutes could mean everything.
Her left arm feels broken in two places, and she's sure her ribs are bruised, if not cracked. But then, she has won; they have won, but the taste of victory is sour in Daine's throat, a fine wine gone rank with the memory of all that has been lost. Ozorne's body is little more than a crumpled shell now, but that is not her concern. There's not enough left of him even worth kicking as a last act of spite, however much she might wish otherwise. Why waste anger on those that couldn't answer back?
Daine doesn't even have it in her to shapeshift a last time, hasn't had it in her for the past half-hour, but her sense of direction hasn't betrayed her yet, and she's got a reasonable idea of where she'd left the rest of her friends.
(An image flashes across her vision painfully-- shattered form, lank blond hair, shining steel--)
She feels a shudder ripple through her, before she forcefully stomps it down. This is not the time for a breakdown, and she'll be damned if she lets carelessness kill her now after all she's done. Come on, Sarrasri, she coaxes herself, eyes burning both with exhaustion and a steely determination, don't shame your ma's name now.
Walk.
The badger's claw gripped in her right hand, Daine begins to make her painful way back home.
Barzha and Hebakh's dirge halts suddenly, near the end of the battle, but what is left of Raoul's army is too occupied with rounding up the last of Uusoae's creatures to notice, and the one being who would have a care is far and away from earshot, hurtling after the enemy she had believed the Stormwings could destroy.
Once, the queen had thought they could too, but they'd made the mistake of underestimating Ozorne -- just as he'd underestimated them, which was a grim irony even she could find the humor in.
Their dirge halts because beyond hope, beyond expectation, there is no longer reason to mourn.
There is, however, reason to worry.
Around his body, Rikash's feathers bend and droop, in a way that nothing of metal should, and they shiver, stirred by a strange wind that neither the queen nor her consort can feel. The feathers make no sound as they suddenly liquefy, slipping down to reveal remarkably human flesh where steel had once grown from. Bone shifts under skin when the fall of cascading silver reaches his hips, and long, lean legs are revealed in its wake.
Daine returns to the rock, naked and bruised, to find an equally naked and alarmingly human Rikash slumped in a pool of glittering mercury.
She's too tired to do anything but stare, and Barzha calls her name three times before the queen gives up and flutters off the rock to hover in front of Daine's face. Hebakh is a silent, reeking shadow behind his queen, and their combined stench prompts the girl to reel back, shaking her out of her stupor. She lifts a suddenly heavy head to glance at Barzha's pinched face, and lets it drop back again to eye the dirtstreaked blond crumpled on the ground before her.
The question to ask is obvious, and it feels like it takes all of her remaining effort to say it. Her tongue and jaws move slowly, just a little out of sync, and her words slur. "What happened?"
The Stormwing queen is grim. "That is a question I was hoping you might have the answer to."
It's late and Daine's tired, and this is really, really the last thing she needs, but it doesn't look like there will be anyone around here to help her out particularly soon. Not that Barzha and Hebakh are useless, exactly, but without some kind of harness, the Stormwings will just be absolutely no help in trying to get Rikash around anywhere. If they were strong enough to carry someone as heavy and tall as Numair, they're certainly strong enough to carry someone as frail as Rikash is now (though she suspects he's always been this thin, even as a Stormwing, and she could almost kick herself for not noticing before. After all, steel or not, feathers were feathers, and she should have known the signs of a creature eating far too little).
Daine's almost frustrated enough to cry, but that's an indulgence she won't allow herself. Barzha seems to understand her dilemma, and suddenly flutters close, brushing a wingtip against Daine's face. Something electric passes from the metal to the girl's cheek, and she jerks involuntarily, cutting herself on a feather's edge. Hissing in brief, renewed pain-- though why a tiny cut like this should bother her when her whole body feels like a massive bruise-- Daine looks at the Stormwing with dull irritation and unpleasant surprise.
Barzha does not look impressed by her ire, and Daine can smell, now, the tang of Stormwing-magic where the queen has cut her. Hebakh has the grace to explain what his mate will not, or perhaps does not think is worth explaining.
"It's a spell to energize you briefly-- we use it when we must undertake flights that tax even us." There's still a hint of Stormwing superiority underneath the sketchy explanation, and Daine notes that he doesn't elaborate on what exactly constitutes a flight that would tax an Immortal.
"I believe your human mages, with the Gift, can do something similar," Hebakh concludes, shrugging awkwardly. It's a motion that Rikash really pulls off much better, steel wings aside, and Daine feels a pang in her stomach when she looks at his now-flightless form. She can't imagine he'll react well to it when he wakes up.
Still, whatever Barzha cast on her really must be some kind of recovery spell, because Daine's starting to feel a bit better. A bit more capable of hauling unconscious ex-Stormwings around, too, which was probably the queen's intent in the first place. Reminded of the task at hand, Daine sighs, then bends down to hook one of Rikash's arms over her uninjured shoulder.
It's going to be a long, painful walk to Sir Raoul's camp, she thinks.
The excruciating process of getting back to her friends is worth it, of course, even if she does attract quite a bit of unwanted attention. She supposes it's her own fault for stumbling in (naked) with a (naked) supposedly-dead, now non-Immortal ally, but it can't really be helped. Daine does wish she'd gotten Barzha and Hebakh to go ahead and warn the camp that they were coming, but then, it's hardly done, asking royalty to run errands.
What little energy Barzha's spell has lent her is used up by the time Daine reaches the camp.
With understandably little ceremony, Daine limps into the healer's tent, where the Lioness has just finished healing what appears to be a soldier with a concussion. Tortall's champion, normally unshakeable, is nonplussed by her entrance, and probably for good reason. Daine can feel the blood and dirt and sweat encrusting her, manky and just plain gross, and she knows Rikash, still slung over her shoulder, isn't much better.
Still, she can't help blushing to her scalp, feeling soul-naked under that amethyst stare.
"Hello, Sir Alanna," is all she has time to say, dizzily, and then she topples over, facefirst.
She was right about that walk, after all.
Daine doesn't remember much of her fever-dreams, except that they seem to involve quite a bit of her shouting at gods (at the sidelines, her parents look alternately impressed and mortified). There's quite a bit of the badger's laughter as well, warm and vibrant, and it keeps her feet grounded while she wages her verbal war with Mithros and the Goddess and even the Graveyard Hag, a war for... for... for something she can no longer remember.
What is clearest in her memory is the sensation of her parents hugging her almost mournfully, and the badger fondly nosing her hand. She thinks her mother whispers something about Numair, but before she can ask her to repeat it, she is suddenly, unpleasantly thrust back into consciousness.
Daine's body feels twice as worse when she wakes up at last, not the least because it had been so peaceful and painless in her sleep. As expected, no one's particularly happy with the fact that she's gotten herself into such a state, but it says something about their level of respect and concern that nothing short of the best healers have been set to watch her, including Sir Alanna and Duke Baird. Much to her dismay, however, she's kept strictly on a diet of nearly-fluid cuisine, and it's only after a day of intense discomfort that she thinks to ask after Rikash.
Baird, who is with her at the time, is silent at first, but at last gives her a noncommittal response. He is not in charge of the Stormwing's health, apparently, and while he has set healers to keep an eye on him, the fact that he seems perfectly fit aside from being unconscious puts him rather low on their list of priorities.
He has, Baird says, been unconscious for three days now-- the same as Daine. But he has not yet woken up.
The girl is quiet for a moment, and then she asks where Rikash is being held.
Baird, distracted by whatever train of thought her initial question has led him to, answers readily.
It's a testament to how explosively Daine can move, and how quickly she heals, that he barely manages to catch her before she plows straight out the tentflap, purple-red with rage. She did not spend all that effort hauling that pitiful remnant of Stormwing meat over to their camp just to see him die again, this time from neglect, and she tells Baird as much. Her litany is, of course, peppered with enough colorful invectives to sting the ears of everyone in the vicinity, and Daine catches sight of a stony-faced Barzha and Hebakh wheeling above the camp before Baird manages to pull her back inside.
Daine eventually gets the promise that yes, Rikash will be seen to, but for the moment, she'll have to be seen to herself, and she forces herself to be content with that. She does, however, insist on being moved into the same quarters as Rikash, a request that makes Baird and Alanna look at each other and Raoul's eyebrows twitch faintly.
In the end, they accede to their demands, and it's not long before Daine is supervising Rikash's upkeep from a bed across the tent from him. The healers bear her impertinent command and interjectiosn with a remarkable amount of grace, understanding that it's Daine's only means of feeling at least marginally useful in this place, with one arm nearly immobile in a splint and ribs bound in what feels like corset-like tightness. What's really getting to her is not the physical immobility, of course, but the sheer drain on her mind that the past few days have been. Whenever they can get away with it, they slip sleeping drugs into her food, forcing her into rest that she personally wants as little to do with as possible, but which they know she desperately needs.
And Rikash?
Rikash sleeps.
On the third day since she's been in any shape to tend to her stubbornly unconscious charge, Alanna finally, reluctantly tells Daine the news she's been dreading to hear.
They think it was a bandit, she says, after the battle. Scavenging. He must have com across him, and... The Lioness trails off, seeming to cringe with the very ignonimy of the death she describes. Perhaps in a way, it is the manner of the death which hurts her more than the knowledge of who has died: she could have, would have handled it better if her friend's murderer had been a powerful one, one worth taking revenge on.
One who could have won against Numair when he was at his full strength, not drained and bleeding after spell after spell.
Daine surprises herself by not crying, although she's not sure why it should be a thing that astonishes her. She's been subjected to the very real prospect of Numair's death quite a number of times already; she's certainly never entertained the notion that the man was invincible. She knows that Alanna's watching her for some kind of reaction, though, and she blinks weakly, head bobbing as she searches for a focus.
She finds it in Rikash's matted blond hair, its tips still tangled in fingerbones that no one has found prudent to remove. Her gaze travels down to his face, and the sight is a comforting one; human or not, awake or not Rikash is still Rikash, and she thinks she can still see a trace of his devil-may-care grin around the slack corners of his mouth. She can almost hear his lazy drawl, poking fun at her numb, pallid face, and Daine blinks slowly.
Numair is dead, and Rikash is not. She cannot help but wonder if, by saving one, she has unwittingly doomed the other.
It would not be correct to say that Alanna is relieved when Daine finally bends over and quietly, fiercely begins to sob.
But it is close.
HUBBA HUBBA I'M DONE. Well, for this part, at least. The chapter title is The End, naturally, because as far as we're concerned, it's my version of the wrap-up to The Realms of the Gods. Note how cheerfully I gloss the godbit over, because I can't remember how it went!
Please don't stone me for killing Numair off. shiftyeyes Is it the easy way of writing him out of the equation? Oh yes, totally so. Do I regret it? Not really, aside from the fact that it reconfirms that I'm too much of a wussy writer to be able to handle more than one pair of characters interacting at a time.
Anyway, I really didn't want to deal with the complicated morass that encapsulates all that is Numair/Daine. I used to love that pairing quite a lot, so I'm not sure what really happened. laughs I guess my tastes changed.
Next time Rikash is actually going to be conscious, really.
Any form of feedback is, of course, appreciated. This story is more of an experiment than anything else; I'm remarkably bad at writing snark, and I'm hoping this will give me a chance to work on that. No guarantees of success, of course. :P
(Idly, I'm very, very bad at capturing character voices, so I'm terribly sorry if the dialogue grates on you, ahahaha. I'm already aware that the Stormwings this chapter haven't been given the voices they probably deserve.)