Chapter Three: A Real-life Nightmare
The sounds of men filled her ears. Men screaming battle cries. Men screaming in pain. Men screaming orders. None of it made any sense – it was all a writhing mass forcing its way into her head but the tones were ones she'd heard many times before. The desperate, frustrated, emotional clamour of battle.
Somewhere, something was on fire. The fumes burnt their way up her nostrils making it difficult to breathe without gagging or choking. It was probably one of the caravans from the convoy; there was the heavy stench of tar-coated wood weather-proofed against the elements as well as the acidic odour of scorched flesh. The smell brought with it suggestions of the scenes that could be found just beyond the trees on the horizon but Kel pushed them from her mind and concentrated on the charging men with lethally accurate weapons.
Around her everything was green. The trees reached forever above searching for the light that had been promised just that little bit higher. Their barks were a blend of emerald and russet where moss clung on in patches. Several of the trees had deadly exposed roots, hardened and distorted on a quest for moisture. The ground below was a blanket of plant-life in a range of colours and heights. Kel's clearing was mostly ankle-high grasses that had been trampled by both the feet of friend and foe.
The Royal Forest – the last stop on the road before the capital Corus. A place storing the magic held in the crown. A place considered safe by all. A place where now two companies of the Own and several Knights were fighting for their lives against slave smugglers.
They had stupidly been ambushed. Kel knew that. The Third and Fifth Companies had been lying in wait for the smugglers on a route uncovered running parallel to the royal road. Kel had been stationed with the Fifth close enough to see the first wagon following a line of chained men beating down the undergrowth for the caravans. And that was when she had realised what the smugglers were risking death to transport from the coast; slaves. The idea of slave smugglers in Tortall made Kel's blood boil and in that moment, before logic and reason had returned to her, the extensive security detail for the convoy had struck from all sides.
The first man of yet another charging group reached Kel and the soldiers on either side of her from the Own moved as swiftly as she did; cutting men down, disarming them, disabling them. Kel ran one man through with Griffin as he tried to cut her neck from her shoulders. She couldn't use her glaive here – the trees were too close together for it to be practical. On and on the smugglers came brandishing swords, daggers, spears and axes.
As hard as they fought they kept coming. Kel dimly noted when one of the men with her fell but she had not time to stop and try to help. She couldn't believe how many there were – how many had been through Tortall taking human beings into the next country where it was socially accepted to have slaves, without anyone noticing...
It was a very non-descript smuggler who injured her. It wasn't any great adversary, any huge challenge of an opponent or even a worthy match. In a battle like this, such close quarters and such numbers, it didn't surprise Kel; not every defeat was one where you were well-matched. Life just wasn't that fair.
It was a small ragged man who simply got lucky and played dirty.
The smuggler jumped in from her left away from the soldier who had almost severed his shoulder. He brought his sword up in a swooping underarm strike and sliced easily in the space between plates of armour to pierce her belly. He didn't live much longer after that but the damage was done.
The wound was deep and started to bleed heavily almost as soon as the blade slid under her skin. Yelling in pain and frustration Kel stumbled back slightly from where the remaining line of the Own continued to hold their positions. One of those raised roots grabbed her foot as she staggered causing her to fall heavily against the tree it was attached to. She lay there resigned, hands pressed against the wound that did not so much as weep blood but sob hysterically. She could only limit the blood loss a little rather than stop it but she hoped that was enough until someone got to her.
In that small distance away from where the fighting was beginning to swing in the Own's favour a strange silence reined until Kel heard a terrified whimper from behind her tree. The sound made her shiver; so full of pain and suffering was it that she forgot about her own injury and the pain that came like a lover with it. It only took Kel a moment to decide to find the source of the sound even though disturbing her wound would do it more damage in the long run – there was no way she could ignore that noise.
Leaning against the other side of the tree was a small boy Kel took to be the same age, if not a little younger that her son. His face was white from the blood loss for he too had sustained a deep, long belly cut. The boy was thin and ragged like the man who had cut her but where that savage had been filled with hatred this boy was filled with sorrow. He was curled around his wound, hugging his knees trying to hide from the battle that still raged around them even though it made his wound open further.
Kel slid herself slowly to his side where she did the only thing that came to her to try and get the boy to lie back; she wrapped her arms around him. He felt so familiar and yet so different to Tobe there in her arms – he was still only a child after all yet he was nothing but bones and skin where Tobe had felt so solid and alive for most of the time since she had found him. He was obviously a prisoner of the slavers; his bare feet showed signs of barely healed welts raised by iron manacles while his wrists were still held captive by a pair. Yet by his side lay a sword meaning he had been forced to fight.
Slowly and gradually the boy relaxed enough for her to guide his hands to his wound to press the sides together. Every time Kel tried to untangle her arms from the boy so she too could close her wound, he whimpered and started to move frantically causing his wound to seep more. Kel couldn't leave him any more than she had been able to withstand hearing his cries. He looked a little like Tobe and was so young that Kel found herself sitting next to him leaning against the tree getting comfy. When the boy's whimpers turned to cries, Kel soothed him and told him that they would both be alright soon. Over and over he asked for his mother, asked her where his family were, asked her why it hurt so much. He sounded so child-like and innocent that Kel felt tears sheen over her eyes even though her vision was beginning to blur too. Never before had the cries of her child affected her – never before had her maternal instinct truly made itself present. Tobe had fell into her life rather than been brought into it consciously.
In the back of her mind, a small traitorous voice reasoned that a change so large in a well lived personality such as hers must mark the end...
The sounds of the fight were growing more distant in her ears to be replaced by a dull, wet thumping and an odd roar. Every time a sword clanged or someone screamed, an occurrence that was growing less frequent, the boy cried out louder and leaned harder on her shoulder. She couldn't hold his hand, as they both needed both hands to stem the blood flow but it seemed to reassure the boy in the same way so Kel pushed back.
After what felt like an eternity, but could have only been a few short minutes – after all she hadn't bled out yet – the sounds of the fight died completely. Finally a familiar loving face stumbled into view white with shock and pain. His eyes settled on her taking in the wound which eased some of the anxiety in his expression. Kel let out an unsteady breath; Dom was here – everything would be ok. They would both see healers and live to fight another day. Then she would find out about the boy's family and if they were gone, she would look after him with Tobe if he wanted. She couldn't leave him. He had been her only company in what could have been potentially her last moments – relationships made in such a way lasted longer than mere lifetimes.
As cool hands checked her wound Kel's eyelids began to droop but Dom's heavenly voice told her to stay awake otherwise she would be in trouble with Lord Raoul. Kel opened her eyes again and took in the face that had filled her daydreams for the past eighteen months which was for once serious as it regarded her. The feelings she held close to her heart for Dom were worse than her feelings for Cleon and Neal had been combined. It had consumed the space where the warm familial love for her family and friends had sat and seemed to be preparing to break out of that into other areas of her insides as it grew.
Dom turned for a moment and for the first time Kel noticed four soldiers from the Third Company standing with a couple stretchers, behind him. Sombrely Dom spoke and told them that they would have to move her now.
The pain flared in her gut as they did so and Kel didn't care that she cried out. Every nerve ending in her body seemed to be protesting at being taken from against the tree trunk. In that moment she would quite happily have stayed leaning there against the boy if the pain had returned to what it had been before.
Kel opened her eyes again once the jostling had stopped and turned her head to see if the boy had been loaded onto the other stretcher yet.
He had not.
As the men holding her stretcher began to move with Dom at her side Kel yelled feebly for them to bring the boy with them. Dom turned his head to look down at her and Kel gasped in shock at the lack of emotion on his face. He said that the boy was part of the slavers and that his first priority was to get all of the Own's injured to safety. His eyes were carefully schooled into a blank, disinterested look. It held little hint at the concern that had been there moments before. His eyes seemed so strange and alien in that moment, so unlike the Dom that Kel knew. He had always been so caring, friendly and compassionate before then that it didn't make sense to Kel lying there holding her sides together. It continued to make even less to her as the roaring in her ears became louder.
The last thing Kel heard before she fell back against the stretcher was the boy screaming again. He was louder and more desperate than the first time she had heard him crying but it wasn't from pain now. The boy was sobbing for her; he was begging for her to not go, for her not to leave him alone, for her to help him. All the way out of that luscious green forest that was so full of life, Kel heard the desperate dying cries of the child who had been a comforting presence to her as much as she had been to him.
When the cries stopped, not because they had faded out of earshot but because they had ceased to echo about the trees altogether, Kel cried in anguish and closed her eyes ignoring Dom's protests...
And sat up in bed.
Her whole body was dripping with sweat. Tears were running down her cheeks like they had every other time she had dreamt about that day three years ago. Lightly brushing the moisture from her cheeks Kel rose from the bed and crossed to where the full-length mirror stood. She looked a mess but right at that moment, Kel didn't care. Gingerly, she lifted her shirt to tuck the edge in the bottom of her breast-band, revealing her stomach. With her little finger Kel lightly traced the scar that still ran angry and jagged across her pale skin three years on. It was like the wound itself still mourned Dom's actions as Kel did, and what they meant for her.
She sighed and let her shirt drop. A moment later, new tears were tracing fresh tracks down her cheeks as she brokenly whispered into the darkness the name of the little boy she had spent those short moments with.
"Kesa."
That was her little boy's name. He had been ten years old and forced into slavery at a time when Tobe had been eleven years old, her officially adopted son for a year and studying with a professor in sciences.
It was on nights like this when she relived the whole thing rather than simply flashes of her real-life nightmare – that it felt like he truly was hers and the wound was where he had been wrenched from her rather than the thing that had led her to him.
As Kel stood there she remembered what had happened those few years ago when she had woken up in the hospital. For a matter of minutes she had forgotten why she had been there and had been overjoyed that Dom had been sitting by her bed looking absolutely exhausted and anxious. It made her feel ashamed now at how much it had thrilled her when he had admitted how scared he had been when he had found her leaning deathly white against a tree.
And that was what it took to bring her back to reality; because it wasn't the tree she had been leaning against in the end – it had been the boy: it had been Kesa. It all came flooding back to her then, those last few moments before they moved her. The clearest image in her head had been the carefully controlled stare of Dom as he had looked the boy over; the child lying besides her bleeding to death of exactly the same injuries that she had obtained. She who lay there alive now.
She'd cracked then. When Dom went to take her hand and to speak Kel had pulled it away with disgust and screamed at him. She'd told him he was a heartless fool who should have saved the child with so much of a life left to live rather than her. She couldn't believe it – her Dom, Neal's dear cousin; just as sweet and gentle and caring but more intelligent and witty. Kel remembered how bitterly she had felt when she thought that she had been wrong about Dom and too eager to believe that he was as good as his cousin; her best friend.
Dom determinedly took her hand again then, in the hospital, and told her of how they had managed to save ten men of the Own after they had brought her out of the forest, that might not have made it if they had tried to get the boy on the stretcher too without making the wound worse.
Kel had screamed, furious at him and feeling guilty for letting them take her to leave the boy alone, demanding to know what gave him the right to choose who to help; to choose who would live and who would die. Neal had appeared at her bed side then and ordered Dom out before giving Kel a sedative to make her sleep.
When released from the hospital Kel had gone straight to Raoul to demand to know what had happened. He had been happy that they had managed to save so many of their men from such a bad situation which Kel could appreciate. When she explained what had happened Raoul understood why she was upset but asked her what she would have done in Dom's position, if you could see that moving the boy would only make the wound worse. Kel held no ill-will against Lord Raoul for his answers – he hadn't been there – but he had made her feel sickened by herself when she realised that she probably would have done what Dom had done. She was just as bad as him but that didn't make her forgive him any.
It was at that moment that Keladry realised that while she was angry at Dom for the choice he had made, she felt angry at herself for she would have done the same – and she felt angry at the military training that they had both received - the same as Lord Raoul, which would have made them to make that choice. In that moment Kel felt old for the first time; for the first time in her life and her career the injustices that she had witnessed as a soldier got past her Yamani guard and had struck deep at her green insides, sucking the colour and innocence from them.
The next time Dom had come to see her at the hospital he caught her crying for Kesa and demanded to know why. When she had tried to explain Dom couldn't see what made her cry and Neal had arrived again to put her to sleep before she hyperventilated. Moments before she became unconscious, Kel remembered looking up into the face of Domitan of Masbolle – the man she loved but loathed and who made her loath herself – and asked him who he was. After that her memory was filled with darkness and brief memories of days in the hospital but no more of Dom.
Neal had explained afterwards that he had kept her sedated whilst she healed and had forbidden Dom from coming to see her until Neal himself had managed to talk to her. Since then Kel had avoided close contact with Dom and avoided the subject with Neal, still guilty about Kesa's death and sick to her core that she was so similar to Dom that she would have done the same in his place.
Back in her room, Kel turned away from the mirror and all those painful memories, climbing wearily back into bed. Her disturbed sleep had left her unsettled but she knew that it was just stemmed from seeing Dom again. Kel breathed deeply in for five beats, held it for five and then breathed out for five as she lay on her back, like her Yamani teachers had taught her as a child. Immediately she felt calmer. It only took several more repetitions for Kel to feel suitably relaxed to turn over, get more comfortable and to drop into a restless dreamless sleep for the rest of the night.
