She woke up for the first time in a very long while with more than a dreamy awareness of where and who she was. She lay with her eyes closed and savored the dull ache that lodged in her chest. The scratchy rawness at the back of her throat that signified tears to come or tears already shed. Which, she didn't know. Recent memory was hazy and incomplete. She opened her eyes on faint, spore dusted sunlight. There was warmth and comfort. And confusion. She drew her brows, wetting her lips, wondering why she was lying next to Kall-Su, one knee thrown over his thighs, one arm draped over his chest. Embarrassing situation to find oneself in. Granted he was under sheet and blanket and she on top of them, but still --- her sense of propriety was scandalized.
Then she realized that someone was pressed against her back and that an arm was encircling her and she felt a moment of dazed panic -- of bewildered claustrophobia, before she tilted her head to catch a slice of Rushie's profile, mostly concealed by the wealth of silver hair spilled over his shoulders and over onto her own. She slowed her breathing forcing back the shock. Trying to understand. The ceiling was a blank canvas which did not divert her attention, so she stared at it blindly and tried to sort her thoughts. Tried to organize her memories. It was a hard task. Recollections meandered aimlessly about in her mind. Flashes of images here. Remembrances of pain there. Tears welled up in her eyes, running down her temples and into her hair. She could not quite recall where she had been for long while, but she knew where it had started. She knew how it had started and by who's hand.
She choked back a sob, bringing a hand to her mouth to bite -- anything to keep the cry back. A few moments where her body betrayed her, trembling uncontrollably, then she fought to bring back some semblance of control -- of strength. Shifted gently so that she could bury her face in Rushie's shoulder, feel the silken strands of his hair against her cheek and inhale the scent of him. She missed him. She thought he had been here all along and she had been as far away from him as a continent or the distance between earth and hell. Only this time she'd been the one in that fiery demesne. Her fingers clutched spasmodically at the soft material of his shirt, at the hard muscle underneath. He stirred, drawing breath in a sudden soft hiss, jerking his head back as if startled out of some bad dream.
"Shit." His breath tickled her hair. "Yoko?"
She didn't say anything, just buried her face against him and felt him almost hesitantly tighten his arm around her, drawing her body closer. She wanted control over her emotions, but it kept slipping through her fingers, fickle and elusive. The tears leaked anew and she whispered hoarsely.
"I'm sorry. I don't know where my head's been lately." Where her head had been. As if she had forgotten to snuff out the candles before leaving the room. She tried to come up with something more eloquent to say and all she ended up crying was. "Oh, goddess. Oh, goddess. My baby. He took my baby."
He pressed her head against his shoulder, stroking her hair. "I know. I know. It's okay. It'll be okay. He'll burn for it, I swear."
She shuddered, trying to keep from wailing out her grief. She had the vague impression it was long overdue. That she had put it off for weeks and weeks. Flashes of pain long gone but only now remembered traced the line of her nerves; of her spine. She bit her lip and tasted blood.
"You brought me back." She murmured, amazed. "I was dead and you brought me back."
"It wasn't your time."
"I think I wanted to go."
He didn't say anything to that. She shifted to look up at him, moved a hand to brush his hair back because she needed to see his expression. He looked troubled -- at a loss perhaps to deal with that declaration. It was a weakness of his, that balking at the truly, deeply personal anguishes. He'd rather pretend they weren't there, or banish them with the sheer strength of his will -- anything but admit to suffering or acknowledge that something he loved could hurt so badly and there was nothing he could do about it. She didn't mind. It just made him a little more human.
"I don't anymore." She said softly and that admission brought to mind that thing which had dragged her from the daze she had been existing in back to reality. "Oh, Rushie, what happened to Kall?"
His lips tightened, lashes fluttered down to cover the glimmer of anger in his eyes. He didn't have to answer for her to know. The same thing that had happened to her. How long? How long for her to get the sense that he preferred death over waking. She had drifted by the room and that seventh sense she had had latched onto misery -- onto fear -- onto overwhelming guilt. But they were aimless, drifting emotions with nothing to anchor them because Kall-Su wasn't there to put a name on them. The things that made up Kall-Su were buried so deep that he was lost and all that existed in the upper layers of subconscious was a traumatized, crying child.
She pushed herself up, her own misery pushed aside as she realized someone else she loved was suffering. She laid a hand on his cheek, wishing him back with all her might. If she could come back, he could. But no response. Nothing but a fluttering movement of his lashes, a hitch in his breathing before it evened out.
"He's hurt. He doesn't want to come back."
Schneider sat up behind her, wrapped an arm about her shoulders, looking over her head at Kall-Su. "I don't care what he wants."
"Yes you do." She said softly. "But maybe it will make a difference anyway."
She was somewhat shocked to see her father. She thought she had dreamed his presence. To find him here, in Sta-Veron, was a surprise she was not certain was pleasant or foreboding. A certain guilt for leaving Meta-Rikan without telling him good-bye - or even leaving a note of explanation had weighed on her for months. He didn't seem to care. He was overjoyed to see her with awareness in her eyes, wrapping her in his smothering embrace until she couldn't breath and whispering prayers of thanksgiving to the goddess for her recovery.
In fact everyone from the kitchen staff to Captain Kiro gathered around her when she descended downstairs to the main hall, practically suffocating her with their goodwill. She was saved by Schneider's foreboding presence and dark warning glares. They backed off when he stepped up behind her and congratulated her on her health from a distance. He put his hands on her shoulders very propietarily and dared Geo Note to make an issue of it. Father was wise enough to do little more than frown at the familiarity. One had to assume he knew of the miscarriage and thus of their more than proper relationship. Her face flushed hot. She could not quite look him in the eye, afraid of the reprimand she might see there.
Cook went to extra trouble to make a suitable celebratory feast in her honor, which made Yoko nervous and shy. She hated to be the center of attention, but even Schneider seemed content to give her the honor this day. He lurked around her protectively, positively terrifying any of the maids she had made friendships with from coming up to her and talking. The only person who wasn't afraid of her was Gara who grabbed her up off her feet and hugged her.
"What a day for luck." He laughed. "We get both Kall and you back. The fates are smiling, humm?"
"Luck. Yes." She murmured and wished she could break away from all the smiling faces, because she did not feel particularly happy. Her head spun a little from dizziness. She needed a breath of fresh air.
"Where are you going?" Schneider asked when she rose.
"Just outside for a bit. It's stifling in here."
"Company?"
"No. I'll be back in a minute."
He let her go and she slipped out the main doors and stood on the great front steps breathing in the cool afternoon air. Almost evening. A day had gone by and she had slept it away. Weeks had gone by with her walking in a waking sleep. The snow was nothing but patches in the courtyard. People tromped across it, grinding it further into the mud. Solders going or leaving duty. Stable boys carrying wheel barrows full of muck to the compost heap out side of the castle walls. Servants coming and going from the city. People going about their afternoon's business. A maid came from the direction of the barracks carrying a basket of laundry. A servant Yoko hadn't seen before. So much seemed to have changed while she drifted in her own world. The girl never looked up at her, just walked through the mud past the main entrance heading for the service entry around the far corner, but Yoko, who's powers of perception seemed unusually active, sensed a spark of light within her. A lyrical shimmer of something that did not quite coincide with the humble exterior she wore. She passed beyond the corner with the barracks's laundry.
Yoko hesitated to go back inside, dismayed at the sound of so many voices, the laughter, the celebration that these people latched onto out of desperation -- anything to drive off the long harshness of winter. To drive off the other tragedies they endured so stoically in the north. She was not up to it yet. So she chose another route. She stepped down into the mud and picked her way around the courtyard, followed in the wake of the servant girl to the large, low ceilinged laundry room, where the girl and another dour faced woman who never seemed to have anything to say to the other servants or anyone else for that matter scraped clothes over ridged wash boards. The later looked up with an indifferent expression when Yoko loitered in the doorway. The other dumped her load into a tub of soapy water and began swishing the clothes about with single minded efficiency.
"Hello." Yoko said. The older woman looked at her as if she were spouting gibberish. The younger one half looked up from under a fall of dark hair. Silence soaked the air. Yoko begin to feel embarrassed for coming at all.
"Hello." The dark haired girl finally murmured, as if uncomfortable with the expectant silence. Her hands worked at wringing out a heavy tunic.
"I saw you walk by. I didn't recall seeing you here before and ---" And what? She was nosy? She was trying to find anything to escape the furor in the main hall?
"I only came last night." The girl said softly. Her voice was an evenly modulated whisper, just loud enough to hear, but one had to strain a little.
"Oh."
Another length of silence. Then the older laundry woman snapped in exasperation. "Your wizard brought her back with him. She was one of his lordship's enemy's slaves."
"Oh."
The girl worked diligently at her wash. Yoko leaned against the door frame, staring, even though she knew it was unpolite. There was something about the girl that struck a chord of familiarity.
"Do I know you?" She was never one for avoiding an issue that ate at her.
"No, milady." The girl answered.
"I think I've seen you somewhere -- I just can't put my finger on it."
The girl sighed, looked up from under the concealment of her hair. She had a pretty face -- what one could see of it. She had a slave tattoo on the hand she lifted to tuck one side of her hair behind her ear. The tattoo did it. Yoko remembered this girl singing. Remembered the clarity and the almost magical lilt of her voice as if she had heard it only days ago, not months.
"You're the minstrel that was singing at the tavern in Judas. You were with the wizard I tried to hire."
The girl very slowly inclined her heard.
"How on earth did you get here?"
"Yoko? What the hell are you doing in the laundry room?"
Schneider stalked up behind her, obviously having gone long enough without her presence. She turned, grabbed his sleeve and pulled him a few unwilling steps into the cold, clammy room. His head almost brushed the ceiling.
"This is the singer that was with the wizard in the tavern in Judas. The one I got to help with the wards, remember?"
He turned his nose up slightly, looking as if he'd really rather not be here. "That hedge witch? Don't waste the term wizard on such a charlatan. He probably couldn't have healed a wart much less understood those wards."
"Don't say that." For the first time the dark haired girl's voice rose above a whisper. She glared at him angrily, jutting out her small chin. "He was a decent man and he died because of you."
"Oh, no." Yoko whispered.
Schneider sniffed disdainfully. "No great loss, I'm sure. But you found a new master soon enough."
"Rushie!" Yoko elbowed him sharply in the ribs.
"He killed Elijaro. He killed him for nothing more than talking with you. I had no choice." Almost there were tears in the girl's eyes. Almost, but not quite and not tears of sorrow, but of frustration.
"You must have made a cozy niche for yourself to have survived so long in the Prophet's care. Did you warm his bed, little slave girl?"
Yoko glared, hating that smug, predatory look in Schneider's eyes, the one that turned him from a man she loved to one she just wanted to hit. Repeatedly.
"You're just like him." The girl said, voice gone soft again. "Just like the Master. You don't care about anything but your own satisfaction. You don't care who you hurt to get it. I can see it in your eyes."
Schneider's smug look turned to one of anger. Yoko felt him tense, put her self in his path when he might have taken a step towards the girl. The older laundry woman was staring between them in open mouthed shock.
"You little bitch. I should have left you there to rot."
"You should have." She agreed, hair falling back down to cover her face.
"I dislike you." He hissed. Yoko put her hands on his chest and shoved him backwards a step.
"Out! Just get out and go cool off!" She gave him another push and he glared at her. She narrowed her eyes and met it levelly. "Now, Rushie!"
He said something under his breath, but retreated. She hoped he didn't do anything violent. She had heard about the castle wall. She turned back to the girl, took a breath and extended a hand.
"I'm Yoko and I would very much like to hear what happened?"
Yoko was simply amazing. Lily could not quite recall meeting anyone like her. Candid and bluntly honest and sincerely concerned for the plight of a mere, common slave, when she was obviously so much more. Lily just did not share with people, it was too painful, yet she found herself telling this girl she had known only a few hours about her earliest memory of being a slave. Of watching her family grow smaller and smaller on that distant dirt road while she was taken away by the man they had sold her to. She had never told anyone that, but Yoko dragged it out and patted her hand and looked at her with those great brown eyes in compassion. Pity would have made Lily withdraw. Compassion she did not know how to deal with.
She told her about being taken by the church guard in Judas and of her master's gruesome death at the hands of the man she now knew was the legendary Prophet. She spoke haltingly of her time in the Place Without Windows. Of the isolation, of the fear that any small thing she did wrong would result in her own grisly death. She spoke carefully about Kall-Su's coming to that place, of the Master's fixation on him. Of some of the terrible things he did to break him and Yoko's compassion turned hard and brittle. It was an anger they had in common.
"I can't recall wishing death -- really wishing death on another human being -- but I wish it on him."
They sat beyond the stables, on the crude stone bench circling the stable well. Lily had her legs pulled up under the plain but thick woolen dress Keitlan had supplied her with. She had been given thick boots that laced up to her calves and kept her feet amazingly warm. Yoko told her what the Master had done to her. What he had taken from her and tears slipped down her cheeks in the telling. Lily had never had anyone admit a thing of so heart wrenching and personal a nature to her. No one confided so deeply in a slave. She stared, thinking that this young woman, not so much older than herself, was one of the strongest people she had ever known.
"And yet, I don't know if I want Rushie going after him. I don't know whether its selfishness or fear."
"I'm sorry I said that to him." Lily said, and she was, but for Yoko's sake, not his.
"Its all right. You were right -- sort of. He gets a little megalomanical sometimes and he used to be really bad, but he's not anymore."
Lily had heard the stories. The campfire tales of Dark Schneider and his reign of conquest. A little megalomanical seemed somewhat subdued when speaking of him. But he had come and destroyed the Place Without Windows, which in her mind was the worst hell she could imagine. He had done it to rescue Kall-Su, who was -- and she shivered helplessly at the thought -- another figure out of whispered legend. The High King of Ice. The Ice Lord. Cold Death to his enemies all the stories said. And she had dared to touch him. To yearn for something that could never be in the desperate desire to banish the solitude the Place Without Windows had cast over her. Fool. Fool. Fool.
"Still it was not my place to say." Lily admonished herself.
Yoko grinned at her. "It was terribly brave. Do you know how many people in the world would have the nerve to say something like that to his face?" She held up the fingers on one hand. "Probably less than this."
"I'm not brave."
"Oh, I think you'd be surprised. You've survived this long, haven't you. That takes courage."
Yoko's praise made her nervous. She stood up of a sudden. "Mistress Keitlan will be angry at my laziness. I must get back to work."
"Oh, she's not so bad." Yoko smiled at her, a sunny smile that seemed to make the day brighter. Lily shook her head, amazed again.
"We'll talk again, okay?" Yoko insisted as she hurried away. She did not answer, but she thought she would like that very much.