Ow, I grunted, grimacing as Amon finished helping me out of my uniform and guided me to sit on the bed, pulling close a bowl of water and setting it in his lap, coaxing my sprained ankle up to rest on his thigh next to it, while I pressed one hand to my chest, breathing shallowly.
You're lucky it isn't any worse, he replied, looking up at me, mask still on, grey eyes unreadable. The light on the bedside table was on to illuminate while he worked, carefully tugging off my boot and then my sock, dropping them both to the floor, picking up one of the cloths from the bowl, setting it onto my ankle to help the swelling go down. You didn't break any other bones.
My entire body is one huge bruise. I rubbed at my eyes with my free hand and Amon sighed, shaking his head, shifting off the chair to leave my foot balanced there and moving to sit next to me on the bed, carefully unlacing his bracers and setting them on the mattress, rolling up his sleeves.
And a cut, he sounded amused. You've got plenty of those too. They were mostly the little stinging kind—caused by falling into a bunch of trees and by the Avatar's dog's claws. The claw scratches were significantly larger and deeper. Wetting the other cloth, Amon started sponging them down, gently wiping away the dried blood, uncaking the scabs. How did it happen?
After Tenzin's kid knocked me over the roof it took me a while to get back up— I had landed on my tailbone, hard, it was probably a miracle that wasn't broken either, I made it just in time to jump at the four of them on the dog. And you really can't do much against a polarbear dog.
I learned that lesson a lot younger than you did, clearly. Amon chuckled and finished with the larger cuts and made quick work of the smaller ones—it stung, but hurt a lot less than the broken ribs did. When I was twelve a polarbear dog tore down half our family tent and ate our entire winter's store worth of seal jerky.
What happened? He nudged me to lift one arm, and cleaned up the scrape along the edge of my shoulderblade from the roof that I had hit, and then set the cloth down in the water, diluting it red, and picked up the roll of bandages and a few solid pieces of splint. He ran a few layers of bandage around my chest and then paused.
Put those on, he said, handing them to me, and I pressed one to the front side of my broken ribs, and one to the back, and then he continued to bandage me up. My mother was devastated—a lot of our income at the time came from what we caught, and my mother was the best in the village at making the spices to dry them with. Arm down, and I did that, and Amon switched to wrapping the bandages over my shoulder and upper arm, over the scrapes there, until he could switch back to going around my chest. So my father and my brother and I formulated a plan.
He had never mentioned a brother before, but I had only ever mentioned my siblings when they had died. So I didn't pry at the time—I was just happy enough to hear stories of his childhood.
My brother went out to get more seals—it was early enough in the winter that we could get a few more and manage to restock, but not sell anything. My father and I went hunting for the polarbear dog that had done it. We found it four miles from the town. We didn't fight it, but we stole back what it had taken—they tend to bury their food in the snow for later. We got back about a third of our foodstores and my mother's favourite dress mostly unharmed.
Amon tied off the bandages then and turned to sit next to me, our thighs pressing against each other, and he brushed back his hood, pulled off his mask, and lowered it to hold it in his hands. I looped one arm around his shoulders, pulled him close, and he leaned against my arm.
That was the last time I think I ever enjoyed spending time with my father. His voice was very quiet, and I turned to press a kiss to the top of his head, brushing back his thick, dark hair, pressing my nose into the top of his bangs, still tugged back but looser now, at the end of the day.
I didn't say anything, because there wasn't anything to say. I just held him, and let him cry quietly, because twenty years before Amon had done the same for me. He had made me whole again. I would wait for the chance to do the same for him.
— Chapter Two: —
fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject
to the same diseases, healed by the same means,
warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer
[ The Merchant of Venice, Act III, Scene i ]
Pausing before I unwound the bandages from the kit, I looked over at Amon, laying there, the stillest I had ever seen him. "Can you heal?" I asked, and for a moment he remained motionless and then there was the slightest shake of his head—no. Not that healing probably would have been able to do much—in his state, the most it would probably do was accelerate his own healing process. Light burns were one thing, but this was bad enough that I could see blackened areas. His bones, in some places.
I didn't even know if he would heal at all.
The moon was high and full, and I hesitated for a moment. If we stayed here, the tide would continue to come in—saltwater in burns didn't seem like a good combination. I needed to get him somewhere that I could actually treat his wounds. Light a fire, boil water, and clean the burns before I bandaged them.
Tarrlok's body was also here. And I didn't want to sit next to it forever—I hadn't liked him in life and it was even more chilling in death. "Come on," I said at last, and bent over, hesitating for a moment before I slid one arm under his waist, dragging Amon upright carefully, avoiding touching his burns as much as possible. He was dead weight, completely unable to move his own muscles. And unfortunately, I wasn't in much better shape. The pressure in my chest was hellishly painful.
Amon could fix it. Thus the saving him, I told myself, but it wasn't true. I wasn't saving him so he could save me. I was saving him because I loved him.
Groaning, shifting to throw his left arm, mostly uninjured, over my shoulder, I grit my teeth to stay crouched, hooking one hand under his left thigh and shifting him up my back. This sort of thing had been hard enough to do when he had passed out working at his desk, but then I hadn't been dealing with picking him up around half a body worth of burns. Turning to get his right side, as badly burned as it was, I hooked one hand under his other leg.
He hissed into my ear in quiet pain as my wrist wrapped around some burns on his thigh. "Can you handle it?" Head turned slightly, I looked at the remains of what had once been his face. One half-cracked eye looked back at me. Amon nodded, and I shrugged under his right arm over my opposite shoulder, and, balancing him like that, scrambled to get the first-aid kit back into the bag and grabbed it, pausing for a moment before I leaned down, ducked my head under the strap, and let it hang from my neck.
It was heavy and I was going to have muscle aches there on top of everything else later, but we weren't going to survive without the limited supplies. And once again, I was giving my everything for him. Grunting, struggling, I managed to get to my feet with Amon leaning boneless on my back, motionless, and I pulled him higher.
The path was a good four steps up the rocky sides of the beach, but I paused before I started climbing it and looked down at Tarrlok. The head on my shoulder shifted slightly—these clothes were going to be ruined when we were done here—and Amon stared as well.
"He would want the water," Amon finally said, barely able to whisper it. I wondered for a moment if he was saying that because it was true, of if it was because he wanted to make it easier for me. Turning to look out over the water, at the debris still floating in, I glanced toward the moon, sitting low on the horizon, huge and full. I could see all the patterns on its surface, the white light it cast reflecting back off the water, and I felt suddenly warm.
Almost like I could hear a young woman laughing. Like my sister. It felt like a punch to my stomach and I looked away, back to the rocky wall of the beach, took a deep breath, and started to climb.
It was amazing how long four steps upward took me. The first time I tried I almost immediately overbalanced and it was only my reflexes that stopped both of us from toppling over—and if I had landed on top of Amon at that moment, he probably would have passed out, or I would have done something even worse to his already-terrible burns. And the pain in my chest probably would have knocked me out. It was bad enough now that I had all of Amon's weight leaning onto me. But, I righted myself, grit my teeth, and was more careful the second time, leaning to counterbalance the extra weight as I took the first few steps up, dragging myself onto the path, half-dropping to one knee and grunting at the sharp stab of pain up my leg before I stumbled to my feet.
Amon was heavy. Due no doubt in part to his waterlogged clothes, but still. The road stretched on ahead of us, no longer paved except with gravel and the lines of cart-tracks (you hardly ever saw Satomobiles outside of the Republic City limits) and it turned around the edge of the ocean, leading off into the distance.
And so we started walking. I started walking, step by painful step, staring down at the ground, half-illuminated in the light of the moon, while Amon breathed shallowly next to my ear, grunting in pain every few steps.
How many times had we been in this position, one way or another? We met because he got himself hurt, and plenty of times since then I had carried him home and patched him up—but that wasn't even the tip of the iceberg. Just recently he had been helping me stay standing—after the Avatar's dog broke my ribs Amon had been the one to come find me on the beach of the island, half-caught in the branches of a tree, in excruciating pain, and had carried me back to our tunnels to fix me. The night where the Avatar hit me with a wall of stone in Tarrlok's hideaway, and Amon had berated me, and then fixed my dislocated shoulder. And before that, the night of Hiroshi's outing as a supporter, when we had dragged ourselves back to the tunnels, and instead of exploding he had just patched up my burns.
That was what being lovers was about. You were always there for each other. Or so I had thought. And now here I was again—picking us up and putting the pieces back together. I had more to give than Amon did, but sometimes being the one that walked a mile while he never moved an inch got old.
Not that any of that mattered. I didn't even know if Amon would survive the night. And how long I would last, either, bleeding like I was.
Trudging down the path, my pants leg no longer wet, feet crunching in the gravel, the moon was beginning to arc up toward the top of the sky as the last edges of industry and the city petered off into the emptiness of the farmland that sprung up around Republic City, and the path split in two.
I came to a halt. It had been twenty years since I had walked this far out of the city without a map, and I paused, glancing between the two, unsure of which way to go. Amon was out cold on my shoulder, so there was no asking him, and I hesitated.
Right, along the edge of the ocean, left further inland, to where a copse of trees started to flourish, and eventually no doubt thickened into an actual forest. In the forest I would be able to find some wood to start a fire, and that could let me boil water to clean off Amon's injuries—since we were so near the ocean, there would probably be a stream if nothing else. So, left.
Turning and starting down that path, I kept walking until the woods were thick around us and the moon was straight overhead in the sky, almost like it was rising to follow us, staying close to light my way, and exhaustion started to get to me. We would need to stop soon—I still needed to bind Amon's wounds.
And then I saw it through the trees—a light, in the distance. It wasn't the moonlight reflecting off of something, either. It was yellow, peering through the trees.
I hurried my steps, not even thinking about what I would do when I found it. If it was a campfire, or a house, or a small town. If it was a farm or a car—I just kept walking until we rounded a curve in the trees and I could see it fully.
It was a small farmhouse surrounded by a few fields with recently-tilled soil. There were two ostritchhorses outside in a pen talking to each other and scraping the ground, and even though the moon was high in the sky, there were quiet voices coming from inside. I could feel Amon stirring slightly, and I hesitated—and then I walked along the path between the fields.
I could ask to sleep in their barn, maybe use their fire to boil some water to clean him up. Nothing more—not because I didn't want to take charity but because we were strangers. Because we were the two most wanted men in Republic City. If it wasn't for the pain in my chest that I had been steadfastly ignoring, the solid knot just behind my sternum, the slowly-growing ache in my abdomen, I wouldn't have walked up the path, dragged myself up the steps to the front door, shifted to hold Amon tighter by his uninjured thigh, and knocked on the door.
The whisper from inside cut off abruptly with my knock, and I stood there, listening to Amon breathe, trying to count each one. They were significantly shallower than they had been when I had picked him up from the beach—which had probably been several hours before at this point. He was cold. Getting colder.
There were footsteps approaching from the inside and the door swung open, letting the yellow light from inside out. There was a young woman standing there in the doorway—Earth Kingdom no doubt, with dark hair pulled up in a bun, calm, thoughtful brown eyes, and wearing a loose night shirt with loose silk pants underneath. She stared at us for a moment in surprise.
"I know it's late," I started. My voice sounded so much more exhausted than I felt. "But could I borrow your fi—"
"Nan!" the woman shouted, and I jumped, jerking my head back, smacking it hard into Amon's. He woke up with a groan, fingers of his uninjured hand curling into my shirt collar, and I juggled to keep him upright a moment later as he turned his head. "Nan, come quickly!"
The woman slammed the door in our faces.
"What?" Amon whispered, incoherently. I grimaced—not like I blamed the woman for running for her husband (most likely) since two strange men, one burned utterly beyond recognition, had just shown up on her front doorstep, and I turned to step down from the porch. I was in no shape to fight. Amon was half-dead. Better to leave before one of us got hurt more.
The door reopened and the light spilled back out. It was the same woman, but this time with an older woman next to her. "Come in," she gestured us in. "Please." I hesitated, and turned back.
The older woman sucked in a gasping breath. "Oh no," she said quietly. "Here. Come in, quickly. I'll see what I can do." And then I noticed the pendant hanging at her neck—pale blue stone, carved.
She was Watertribe.
We had found a healer.
Half an hour later and Amon was laying on the bed in the older woman's room—her name was Nan, and she was the young woman's mother-in-law. She had come here with her son, Toloak, when he and Xian, the young woman, had gotten married. She was from the Northern Water Tribe, and had eyed us both carefully, before carefully undressing Amon from his uniform, making certain not to damage his burns anymore, and had taken inventory of them then. It had taken a while. His burns were even more extensive than I had thought at first glance.
"Here," Xian handed me a bowl of soup. "What happened?" Nan had a bowl of water and was pulling it onto her hands, starting with Amon's back—the works of the burns.
"I'm…not sure." Her husband stood in the doorway of the room, arms crossed. "I found him on the beach like that. His brother was with him." I didn't need to say any more. I had only brought one person with me. "I was going to boil some water and clean his wounds and bandage them but—"
"You're lucky you found us, even luckier that tonight is the full moon." Nan had a quiet, husky voice. She reminded me a bit of my mother in the calm, careful way that she worked, blue eyes unwavering. "He would not have survived more than a day. I can't stop the scarring, but I can stabilise him. Nothing but time will heal these wounds."
I felt my heart race suddenly, looked at Amon's face. Eyes closed, unmoving, his face turned toward me, I was glad he was unconscious again. All the burning, raging anger that I had felt earlier in the day was down to a simmer, bubbling deep inside of me. It was replaced with a sort of aching cold that filled my bones and sank at the pit of my stomach like a brick in the water.
I couldn't even begin to imagine life without him. Without his smile, the way our hands felt laced together, the way he felt in my arms. And he might have broken my heart, but I had loved him long enough and hard enough that there was a callous there, too solid to be pulled apart.
If I lost him, I would lose myself.
Lowering the spoon into the bowl of soup Xian had handed me, I rubbed at my chin and sighed. Nan was still running her hands over Amon's back, and I thought about what we had done to Benders—I had seen Amon take away this power from plenty of people. Healers, policemen, young and old. Some of our own members. And I had never thought about what it could be used for, what good.
If someone had told me a year before that I would ever be sitting next to a Waterbender while she healed the love of my life, first I would have laughed and said that Amon would never have willingly let a Waterbender heal him, because the only person I could think of who hated Benders more than I did was him, and then I would have laughed with him over it. But now I couldn't imagine being anywhere else.
Watching silently as Nan moved her hands over Amon's back, done with the burns around his waist, the wounds no longer weeping, moving up to the charred and blackened parts of his upper back, the yellow of pus, the white of his bones, I set aside the soup. Eating while I watched his burns, as terrible as they were, probably wasn't the best of ideas. Even if broth was most likely all I would be able to handle eating for some time—who knew what Amon had done to my body.
Well, he did. But right now he was unconscious, and would probably stay that way for a while.
"How long do you think they'll take to heal?" I asked, my voice a bit strained—more from the pain in my chest than anything else, although now that the adrenaline had worn off from the events at the Arena, now that I was far enough out of the city nobody would find me first thing in the morning, I could feel exhaustion climbing slowly up my bones, seeping into my skin like the lassitude in your muscles while you were taking a bath. If I went to sleep, I probably wouldn't wake back up for days. And that would probably spell death for him—or for me.
"I don't know," the water followed her hands, and the skin started reforming over the areas where it had been worst burned, covering Amon's shoulderblades before she moved down his right arm. "It could be a month—it could be six. It will take a very long time to heal fully, and even then…" Nan looked over at me. "You know him?"
"Very well."
"His burns will stop weeping, they will close up, they will heal. His skin will not." Her eyes met mine.
They were blue like the depths of the ocean.
"He will most likely never be able to go out in bright sunlight again. Any injuries he takes will be devastating without his skin to protect him. Someone will have to put lotion on the scars to keep them from tightening, and when he gets older he will have issues with it—strains pulling on the burns, most physical work will tire him significantly, and he will probably have problems moving quickly or stretching, at least for some time after he heals."
So there it was. Even if I had been able to recover from my internal damage, Amon would most likely never be a chi blocker again. If he moved too quickly he could tear the burns while they healed—and the scars would tighten his skin all over.
"But he will live?"
"I still don't know." Nan shook her head and sat down on the edge of the bed, to get a better angle, her hands gliding down his arm. Xian, the young woman, paused, and then sat down in the other chair, while her husband came in to lean, one hand on the back of it.
"Where do you come from?" Xian asked, reaching up to take her husband's hand. I noticed for the first time looking over her the slight bump of her stomach—she was pregnant. The guilt hit my shoulders like a wave.
We shouldn't have come here. I shouldn't have come here—this was all my decision, Amon was too out of it to have any input on my decisions, stupid or otherwise. Here was a happy family, a pregnant wife, a doting grandmother. And if we were followed, I could bring down the entire police force onto their heads. Angry former Equalists. Hell—the Avatar.
"From the city," I finally replied. "I—" What had I done? I had left because I wanted to save myself, to get away from his shadow. And I had ended up right back in it. Literally, since he was too weak to walk and I was carrying him. "I left to find him, he vanished yesterday." And then I paused—using just pronouns didn't seem right, and all three of them had already introduced themselves to me. "I'm Te," the second half of my first name, the half I never used, "And he's—" I almost said Amo, since it was so close to the name I knew him by, the name I had used for years. But it was too close to Amon. If they were questioned, Amon would sound similar enough that they could be searched—arrested without warrant, dragged to jail without benefit of charge or trial. "Noa." That was his real name. Noatak and Tarrlok. It fit the two of them—and as I looked back at him, unconscious, hardly looking anything like the man I had slept beside for twenty years, I could see why his mother had picked it. It fit his face—what had been his face. His smile. The way he chuckled.
Somehow I didn't see Yakone picking it. Somehow I couldn't reconcile Yakone and father at all.
"I'm glad you found him in time to save his life," Nan murmured it into the quiet of the room, and then she shook her head. "This might take most of the night. You should all get some rest." She had included me with Xian and Toloak.
"Goodnight, Nan." Xian stood and kissed her mother-in-law's cheek and left, holding her husband's hand, and the room was quiet. I watched her as she kept cleaning him up—her hands brushing healing water over Amon's face, lessening the severity of the burns, making them redder and rawer but healthier.
"You too," she said at last, looking over at me. Amon was still unconscious, his breathing still shallow, but at least he seemed to be resting easier. She reached out her free hand and touched my shoulder and then paused, her eyes narrowing, fingers curling into my shirt. I could feel something—like she was inspecting me. And she watched me closely.
"I'll stick to the chair," it came out more as a growl than anything else and I glanced to the side to break our eye contact. Nan removed her hand from Amon's face, turned toward me, sloughed off the used water and brought up a new handful.
"You're in just as bad shape," she said quietly. "Open your shirt. How did you do this to yourself?"
"I—" I began, but she gave me a look and suddenly all I could think of was my mother—Lieu, honestly, you are the only child who could break their leg in the hayloft, whatever are we going to do with you—and I unbuttoned it with shaking fingers, holding still as the cloth parted, and then I started coughing into the back of my hand, doubling over even as her cool fingers pressed against my chest, tingling against my skin even through the layers of bandages, and I kept coughing until finally it subsided.
There was a lot more than flecks of blood on my sleeve now. There were entire stains. It was getting worse.
"Fell out of a car." I finally managed to get it out. It was a lie, but the truth was even worse—yes, the man you're healing is in fact the most wanted man in Republic City and is a Bloodbender and he tried to kill me. And yet I'm saving his life anyway. And you're helping.
"I can fix your ribs and staunch the bleeding, but nothing more." She stepped closer, her hand brushing around my chest, and I let out a shaking breath and leaned into the wood of the chair, closed my eyes. It had been more than a decade since I had seen a healer, but you never really forgot what it felt like. I could feel my ribs knitting back together, closing up. And as her hand slid downward over my abdomen, I started coughing again—but she was carefully stopping the worst of the bleeding. I could feel her doing it. "You're in even worse shape than he is," Nan's voice was quiet.
"I thought healing couldn't—" coughing into my hand again, I actually felt the blood in my throat. I could taste it. "Fix internal wounds."
"We've come up a bit in the world since the War," even with my eyes closed I could hear the smile in the woman's voice. "Master Katara developed a system to staunch internal bleeding, but it can only be used during the full moon. And it can't fix anything else."
"So what does that mean for me?" The coughing was subsiding a bit and I opened my eyes when she pulled her hand away. The bandages on my chest were damp, and I started undoing them—I didn't need to keep my ribs splinted anymore.
"You have a lot more than just internal bleeding," Nan looked me in the eyes. "Your entire body is jerked to the left. Many of your organs are displaced." There was this sort of cold fear starting to form at the back of my skull. "You will have to be very careful—any strain could make you start bleeding again. I can't fix what causes the problem, I can just stop it. You still have a good bit of blood in your system, it will work its way out on its own."
"Oh." I rubbed at my shoulder, the one that I had landed on when Amon had tossed me. There was a bruise there, but no point in fixing that. "But…"
"If you are very careful," her voice was quiet, and nan turned away, sliding the water off her hand, getting some more, stepping closer to Amon on the bed, reaching out for his head, still closing up the worst of the wounds. "If you are very careful and do not do anything strenuous, you might last two months. But even just walking or running, let alone carrying him…the overwork will destroy your body.
"You will probably have two weeks at most."
I closed my eyes and leaned my head against the back of the chair.
Maybe I did need to sleep for a while.
Years of light sleeping woke me up when the first birds started singing outside the cottage window—I had stayed in the chair until I had fallen asleep, and nobody had moved me. Sitting up, grunting, I rubbed at the crick in my back and my neck from the chair, and looked over at Amon.
Nan was nowhere to be seen (she had probably gone to sleep elsewhere) and had left him on the bed. Compared to last night he looked significantly better. She had been right—there was no healing them completely, they were too terrible. I couldn't see what Amon's burns looked like now, but he was carefully bandaged up, and he was breathing evenly, still unconscious.
So he was alive, at the very least. And looked like he would be alive longer than I probably would be, as long as his burns healed all right. He would be a mess of scars when the bandages did finally come off.
The door into the room creaked and Xian was standing there, looking surprised to see me awake.
"I was just coming to check on you," she said quietly. "Would you like some breakfast?"
"I—" a moment of hesitation. "Yes, thank you."
The young woman smiled and beckoned me to follow her. Pushing myself to my feet I left the little room and followed her back into the main portion of the house where Xian sat me down at a table and spooned up a bowl of warm oats for me to eat, drizzling the top with honey and setting a spoon into it before she handed it over and poured me a small cup of water.
The house was silent as she made her own bowl and sat down across from me, legs folded under her. "I am always up before dawn," Xian began after a few minutes of silence between us. "Toloak wakes up with the sun, but I like to be up first."
"You must not get much sleep," I said, raising my eyebrows—it had been late when they went to bed the night before, but she smiled.
"Normally we go to bed earlier, but last night was an exception. It was a family celebration." She looked out the window at the horizon. "Nan and Toloak are from the North Pole, and last night was the 70th Anniversary of the death of Yue."
I recognised that name distantly. Where had I heard that before.
"Was she…a relative?" I asked, raising one eyebrow and carefully avoiding getting my moustache into the porridge. Xian looked a bit surprised.
"No! She is the Moon Spirit." I almost choked, and then covered it with a half-cough, carefully flattening my face.
"What?"
"Seventy years ago, during the War, Yue, the Princess of the Northern Water Tribe, gave up her life to become the Moon Spirit."
"You're saying the Moon Spirit is a person."
"Was," Xian corrected kindly. "Nan says she looks out for lovers who have lost their way, guides them back to each other so that they can find happiness." I stared at Xian, even though it was impolite—suddenly last night made a very different amount of sense. The light guiding me to find the wreckage, to find this cottage. My sister had, apparently, been spot on all along. "Toloak and I met on the night of the full moon," Xian smiled, looking down into her bowl, a half-smile on her lips. "I've already decided that if the baby is a girl, I'm going to name her Yue."
I looked down at my bowl, now empty, and resisted the urge to close my eyes. I set it onto the table and pushed myself to my feet, grimacing at the pressure in my chest—I might not have been bleeding out anymore, but I had lost a good amount of blood and I was still pretty screwed up inside. "We should get going." It was starting to get light outside. "We've made enough use of your hospitality."
"Let me help you get ready," Xian smiled, and stood up as well. With the two of us it took significantly less time to get ready to go, and she even contributed some food to my travel bag, as well as old clothes for Amon to wear whenever he woke up—looser than the civilian clothes I had taken from the closet in our safehouse, more room for his burns to breathe. By the time that I was standing at their front door, Amon once again over my back, the sun had risen and Toloak was awake—Nan was still asleep, who knew how late she had stayed up healing.
"Best of luck in your travels," Xian smiled at me, and I held up one hand, keeping Amon on my back with the other, and reached into the bag around my neck to tug out my wallet, pulling out half of what was inside, passing it over to her.
"Thank you for everything. You saved both of our lives." There was fifty yuan there, and I pressed it into her palm. "Best of luck with your harvest this coming summer, and with your child." Xian held it and stared in surprise.
"We can't—"
"No, please. Do." I paused, and glanced out the window. "And if it wouldn't destroy your livelihood…how much would it be to buy one of your ostritchhorses?"
Xian and Toloak looked to each other.
"We got them for fifty yuan together," Toloak said quietly, and I reached in and tugged out the other fifty, the other half, and passed it to him. There was still the money from the safehouse—that could get us settled.
"You are wonderful people," I said, meaning every word of it. "May the Spirits watch over you." Toloak just kept staring at the money as Xian stepped forward, helped me open the door, and I walked out onto the porch, the sunlight hitting my face, and smiled. We had a horse, a day to my family farm, and enough money to get started. And I would probably live two weeks.
Well, you never knew. A lot could change in two weeks