Chapter VII
Over the River and Through the Woods
For several minutes, Eirika wondered whither or not she was going to faint. Gulping down several breaths to try to ease the chill from her bones, the Princess of Renais hurried quickly to the side of her general and guardian.
Seth was pale and sickly looking, his crimson hair such a contrast with his pallid, grey-hued skin that the knight almost appeared to be a corpse. There was a fine trickle of blood slipped down his temple, dark bruising on his face and cheeks, his arm was bent at such an angle that the thick leather of his jerkin had been split and bone was visible from the wound . . .
Nothing a healer's staff and several days of rest would not fix.
Eirika's fingers shook as she ran her fingers along the deep gouge marks in his armor's breastplate – as if made by a Gwyllgi or a Mauthe Dog, and the wound from Valter's lance in his side had reopened, so that blood was seeping across the belladonna plants and grass. Puncture wounds, as if made by the tooth or fang of the same canine monster, were embedded so deeply into his neck so deep that Seth was clearly struggling for breath.
Yet no monster would have done the deed. The wounds were too carefully positioned for painful – yet nonfatal – injuries, and yet no human could have inflicted them, for the wounds were definitely those of an animal or monster.
So what manner of beast had done this to Seth?
"Joshua! Saint Latona's Light, Joshua, come help!" Eirika yelled, not caring if hysteria was in her voice and in the tears now flowing down her cheeks. Seth needed medical attention immediately, and she would give up an arm and leg before she let her general remain stranded in this demonic place.
At the sound of his name, Joshua turned quickly to Eirika and beamed widely at her from under the brim of his hat, like an eager child. "Of course, of course! What shall I do, misses!"
"Will you just shut up and help me? Seth is injured and needs a healer immediately!" she said quickly, gripping the Lunar Brace very tightly with her right fingers. What could she do? Seth was far too injured to be moved, and she didn't trust Joshua in his befuddled state to watch the still body alone or to go and find help.
The swordsman tapped his chin with his finger, rocking back and forth on the balls of his feet for several moments. Finally, he snapped his fingers together and grinned widely. "Is this man in need of help, misses?"
Eirika finally chose to ignore him and ran her hands through her hair. What was she to do? What could she do? Ephraim knew how to handle situations like this, not her. She panicked too easily, and it left her mind filled with horrible thoughts instead of anything useful.
Inhaling a shuddering breath and grasping her fingers tight in fists, she racked her mind for the best decision. Eirika doubted that Joshua could find help when he could barely follow her conversations with him and that placed all the responsibility on her.
"Make sure nothing happens to him!" she snarled at Joshua very slowly and clearly, following the only plan her mind could come up with. He blinked, confused for a moment, then nodded jerkily and saluted dramatically. "Aye aye misses!"
Summoning all the energy that remained in her, Eirika hurried from the clearing and through the forest as fast as her legs could carry her. Blood was pounding in her ears, panic in her heart. There had to be a village somewhere in this damned place, some person close by who could tend to Seth's wounds, anybody . . .
"Trouble, trouble! The lady's in trouble!"
The RenaitianPrincess turned to see who had just spoken with that cawing, estranged voice, and, in doing so, her foot caught an exposed root of a tree. With a yell, she fell forward, scraping her hands on the ground and bit the inside of her cheek, causing warm blood to flood her mouth. Swallowing, she looked up angrily at the trees.
Birds – starlings, sparrows, and hawks prominent – lined several branches, tilting their heads crookedly to watch her with eyes whose colors were not naturally possible on those birds. Several of them chanted in broken, raspy speech, "Trouble, trouble! The lady's in trouble!"
"Shut up!" Eirika snarled at them, her fear and anger at this whole situation causing her to break into another outburst of tears.
Nothing made sense in Paradise. The sky was splintered in various weather patterns, a single clearing in the dead forest was alive, Joshua was useless, Seth was injured and dying, she had no weapon, her brother was lost . . .
Eirika sobbed, clutching her temples in anger at her crying. If she couldn't even hold it together in a situation like this, how could she ever expect to face Lyon – even if he was possessed and his soul long dead – or rebuild Renais to its former glory?
"Lady's crying! The lady's crying!" chirruped the birds in their raspy monotones. She clutched her head harder, praying that this nightmare would end, that she'd wake up in reality . . .
"Why's the lady crying? Who made the pretty lady cry?"
"SHUT UP!" she screamed at them, spitting out a mouthful of blood and wiping her mouth on the back of her hand in a very unladylike manner. Eirika pushed herself to her feet, but her legs could not support her and she immediately collapsed back to the ground.
"The lady shouldn't cry! Lady should be helped!"
Upon hearing this, Eirika looked up. She forced herself to stop crying and inhaled several times in order to bring her heartbeat back to normal. Biting her lip, she thought for a moment. Was this a chance for help, or a trap laid out by somebody? Taking another deep breath in order calm herself, she spoke in as clear and as smooth a voice she could muster.
"Can you tell me where I can find a healer?" she asked quietly and the birds exploded in mimicry, their words of broken enunciations.
"Healer, healer!"
"Find a healer!"
"Just tell me where a healer is!" she called back at them.
One of the hawks in the flock of birds fluttered forward, rustling its copper plumage importantly. "Healer, healer!" it jabbered in a mockery of human speech and took off from the branches, skillfully moving through the trees.
Was she to follow the bird? Her better judgment told her it was very obviously a trap, considering that was the same direction Jabberwock had taken when he had left Eirika and Joshua with Seth's body. Yet, what other option did she have? Left unattended, Seth's wounds would kill him.
She stood weakly and followed the hawk through the trees of the barren and decayed forest, her mind ablaze with doubts and questions yet numb at the same time. Her hands were clutched tight into fists at her sides, her gait slow from the slightly aching ankle she had landed on when the tree dropped her, her eyes focused on the traveling form of the hawk in front of her.
Where was Ephraim at this moment? Was he in as much of a problem as she was, or was he even . . . ? Was she even in Paradise, or was this simply a delusion of Eirika's?
That idea would have made sense, had not the sting of copper blood salted her tongue and teeth and her ankle ached in pain. She swallowed the last bit of blood from her cut and paused as the hawk landed on a tree, crying out, "Healer, healer!"
There was a small river just below where the hawk had landed, the water slow moving and crystalline. Yet something about the water smelled odd and made her dizzy, so she held her breath and knelt down to it, furrowing her brow in confusion at what lay under the gurgling water.
Something small and dark stood out against the water, and she grabbed it quickly. It was a small bottle, but one Eirika recognized immediately with a small smile of delight. Healing elixir, its seal unbroken and that of the Church of Saint Latona.
Just seeing the signet brought a sense of normality and reality back to Eirika. She inspected the bottle carefully, and frowned darkly as she spotted a single phrase scratched upon the bottom in large, gothic lettering.
Chloroform in the water.
Although Eirika didn't have the slightest clue at what chloroform was, there was no chance that she could have figured it out. She could barely focus her mind on the most menial of tasks. Whatever was making her dizzy was getting stronger, so that her mind had all but shut down. Just before Eirika's mind went blank, she heard the hawk speak again, but not in its broken quality of mixed enunciations.
"Milady!"
"I'd like to see Alice McGee, please."
The receptionist looked up from her work, an eyebrow raised over jeweled glasses. Megan Moore looked very out of place in the sterile waiting room of the Radcliff Asylum of Psychiatry, her clothes being wrinkled and her hair being uncombed, and the room bore not even the slightest speck of dust.
"Nobody is allowed to see McGee," the receptionist said in a bored monotone, smacking her lips annoyingly with chewing gum, "Is there anything else I can do for you?"
"I thought she was given permission to have visitors," Megan said slowly and darkly, narrowing her eyes. She had been here last week and the receptionist then had told her that McGee would be given visiting hours in a week's time.
"Doctor's orders; no visitors," chirruped the blonde woman stubbornly, returning to her task of filing the sharp points of her nails. Megan narrowed her eyes at the woman but could do nothing else but leave the building in an angry fume.
So much for her interrogation of Mina's murder, thought the young woman nastily as she pulled her scarf tighter to her neck. Winter always brought a piercing chill to the city, and Megan had a long walk back to her apartment. Right after Mina's death, she had moved out of her childhood house and into a small flat in the uptown, mostly to just get away from that blood-stained bedroom that haunted her thoughts.
She had not been able to find any traces of two people named Sieglinde and Siegmund, the twins of Renais, in the past few weeks of searching but she honestly had not expected to. Their names had been painted on the wall of a madwoman, and just by the unusual quality of the two names, Megan was sure they were just pseudonyms.
"Goddamn the insane," she muttered angrily, shoving her hands deep in the pockets of her coat and kicking a pile of grey snow next to the sidewalk angrily, "And Goddamn McGee."
"McGee?"
Megan turned around quickly at the sound of a male voice, adrenaline flooding her body. A young man was sitting in the alleyway in between a bakery and a bookstore, his clothing rags and dark skin gray with the cold. He wheezed and drew himself tighter into a ball for warmth.
"I know a McGee," he said, "Alice, ain't it?"
"How do you know her?" she asked, eyes widening slightly.
The homeless man grinned with yellow, broken teeth that made Megan gag in disgust. "She killed my brother, God bless him."
". . . She killed my little sister," Megan said softly, and the man nodded so that his hair fell over his face and obscured his eyes. He began to cough violently and wheezed out to Megan, "Pity, ain't it?"
She drew her coat tighter to her, thinking deeply. Perhaps this man knew some about these Siegmund and Sieglinde people. Maybe Alice had left a clue at his brother's murder like she had at Mina's . . . ?
"Did . . . she leave some writing?" Megan asked softly and the man gave his yellow grin again.
"O' course, o' course. Ain't you read the papers; she left a message at every murder? Even I knew that," he laughed slightly which ended in him coughing violently again, droplets of blood slipping down his lips. Megan knelt down by the young man and held her hand out.
"My apartment's close by, why don't you come inside?"
This was perhaps the stupidest thing she had ever done. She was almost certain to get robbed by this man, or become involved in something he obviously had done, but he knew some more about McGee that would definitely be useful in her mad search to find these two accomplices of hers, and his information would be of no use to Megan if the man were dead or hospitalized.
He gave another wide, happy grin and nodded, standing weakly and doubled over slightly. "'Ow kind of you, ma'am," he said happily, and Megan nodded. She walked slowly with her hands in the pocket, the homeless man following her and occasionally coughing violently.
"Wot's your name, mam?" he asked politely, almost overly so. She avoided looking directly at him when she answered softly. "Megan Moore."
"Then Mina'd be your sis, right?" he said knowingly, "Wit' the message Siegmund and Sieglinde, the twins of Renais, we guard the gate, right?" She turned around to look at him quickly, to see that he was still smiling widely and pulling his thin jacket tighter to his skeletal body.
"How do you know that?" she asked quickly, and he tapped his temple delicately.
"Great memory. I dun know much, but I remember all o' it perfectly," he said happily, and then began to cough again. "In the papers, that message wuz."
"What's your name, anyway?" she asked; her muscles still tense and voice quick. "Bob Catherine, mam," he said, bowing obnoxiously low, "My brother was Sean Catherine."
The name was slightly familiar to Megan, and she vaguely recalled the news report about an eight-year-old boy's murder some time after Mina's. She flexed her hands to get warmth back in their numbing fingers. "I'm very sorry about your brother. I know what it feels like."
"Can't change the past, can we?" Bob said weakly, "Jus' like to know what she meant by what she wrote, ya know, like who dem Siegmund and Sieglinde people are."
"Did she write anything about them at your brother's murder?"
"Blunt woman, ain't ya?" he laughed sadly, shivering as he did so. "Lesse . . ." He tapped his chin in thought and began to recite something in a faraway tone of voice.
"Ephraim and Eirika of Renais. Lyon of Grado. We Guard the Gate.'"
Renais. The Gate.
That was same place as where Siegmund and Sieglinde had been from, if Megan had interpreted the message correct. Had Alice meant that there were five accomplices to her crimes, Sieglinde and Siegmund, and now these Ephraim and Eirika and Lyon people? Then again, what had Megan expected, explicit directions and an explanation for who these people were and why McGee had murdered all those innocent people?
Well, she was a psychotic bitch, Megan told herself nastily.
Yet, both murders told the message 'We Guard the Gate'. What gate? Why guard it?
"Well then, ain't ya going to show me to your home, Miss. Moore?" Bob asked in a guttural voice, still grinning widely as he looked at Megan. She sighed heavily but nodded nonetheless.
Goddamn humanitarianism, she snarled angrily to herself and continued to lead Bob Catherine to her apartment, shoving her hands deeper into her pockets.
I do not own Fire Emblem, Nintendo does. I own all original characters.