“I suppose I am. And when I have work for you to do, that matters. But this is your eye, Kest – your face, your body. This is not a decision for a chief to make. I want you to think about what you want. For yourself.”
It was not an easy thought for the boy to wrap his mind around, he could tell. It was telling that once he had, he looked to Nira. She saw his gaze and gave a helpless shrug. He looked at his feet for a long time and thought. Renna still held his hand. Finally, he looked up at Gamarron and gave a firm nod, his features calm and composed. Turning, he knelt before the Hand. “Mistress Renna, please. I want to see.”
With a beatific smile – an expression that looked utterly incongruous on the harsh woman’s face – Renna took him by the cheeks and kissed him on the forehead. Then she stood. “Lay there,” she told him, pointing to the ground by the fire. “It will be easier, and I need the light.” She bustled off to her bags, and Nira sat near the boy on a stone.
“What will she do?” the girl asked.
“I don’t know” Kest said. “She said she could help me see again, and that it would hurt.”
Nira shook her head, her silky black hair swaying at her jawline. “Your eye is gone. What will you see with?”
“He will see through a group of compound eyes harvested and implanted in a flesh substrate that will seek out a connection with his brain once it touches him,” Renna said crisply as she returned. “They will give him sight beyond what any other human has ever experienced. He will see the heat present in all things in a way I can’t even verbalize. It will be magnificent.” She stood by him. “Get out of the way, girl. No, not there,” she tsked with irritation as Nira shifted her sitting stone a bit to one side. “You’re in my light. Other side. Stand back! This isn’t a party.”
Grunting with annoyance, the younger woman backed up a few meters and watched.
Renna knelt by the broad young man’s side, seeming suddenly hesitant. “Are you absolutely certain about this, my dear? The eye construct is amazing, and I’m proud of it, but… it is not lovely.” She stroked his cheek. “I’m not sure it belongs in a face like yours.”
He took her hand and patted it. “I don’t care about lovely. I want to see. And if I can see like you say, then I can stand being a little ugly.”
Gamarron noted the look of concern on Nira’s face, and how the boy avoided looking at her. Everyone wants to be beautiful, at least a little bit.
Kest took a deep breath. “Please. Go ahead.” His voice trembled a little bit.
With careful fingers, Renna pulled back the eye patch that covered the pit of Kest’s ruined right eye. Soft, puckered skin lined the empty cavity, and he flinched when the Weaver’s fingers brushed against the ridge of the eye socket. “The scar tissue must be removed so that the new nerves can make connections,” she said. “I have beetles that will make short work of it, but… it will hurt. Badly.”
“It hurts every day,” the boy said. “I’ll stay still.”
“Scream if you need to,” the Hand whispered with that strange gentleness she had only for Kest. Then she pulled a beetle with wicked pincers from her bag and put it in his eye socket.
He stiffened, and his fingers clutched at the dirt as he gasped out short, ragged breaths. Two more of the insects went into the cavity, and soon he was grunting with pain, his fingers flexing and clawing at nothing, his feet twitching. He had the pain under control, if only just. Gamarron was impressed.
The beetles kept at their work for several minutes. Renna was constantly monitoring their progress with deft, gentle fingers. The clearing was silent but for the crackling of the flames and the harsh, pained sound of Kest’s breathing. Nira kept leaning forward like she wanted to step forward, to help, to do something, but she was wise enough to stay put. For his part, Gamarron counted his heartbeats and promised himself that he would never do harm to one who looked to him for aid. Never again.
Renna dipped her fingers into the eye socket and drew forth a beetle. It glinted a liquid red in the firelight. She cleaned it on a cloth and stowed it away, repeating the process for the other two. The boy’s breathing eased. A smear of crimson stained his cheekbone. She put a hand to his shoulder. “Are you ready?”
Lips set in a hard line, the brave boy nodded.
“Good,” whispered Renna, “because this is the hard part.”
She drew a packet forth from her satchel. It was bigger than Gamarron had expected, perhaps half the size of his fist, and strangely shaped with a bulbous, rounded top sealed in black wax and a conical, fleshy underside. From the tip of that cone dangled… something. At first, he thought it might have been a bit of oddly-colored twine, but as it swung from Renna’s hand, he saw the cord moving of its own volition, probing in all directions. A thin, purplish set of feelers waved at its end. Nira grimaced and looked away, disgusted.
Gamarron felt a pang of horror as Renna lowered the questing appendage into the gory pit in Kest’s face. A look of apprehension flitted across his face as he felt some unimagined sensation within his own skull. Then, without warning, the fleshy thing jerked from Renna’s hands and pulled itself tight against Kest’s ocular bone, the conical back end disappearing into the depths of his head. The waxen head looked almost like an eye patch as it filled
