Dragonfly Falling

‘So he found her, at last,’ he murmured. ‘Thank you for aiding him, lady. I realize he is your enemy.’

‘I have no enemies,’ Norsa replied sharply. ‘Mercy’s Daughters give aid to whoever they will, however the Empire may take issue with us. Suffice to say that the imperial army knows your friend is here.’

Totho’s stomach lurched with the thought and he turned to Drephos. ‘Then you must have known!’

Totho caught a sardonic smile from under the hood. ‘Norsa here holds me to blame for the injuries done to many of these men. I hear no news from her Daughters, and I heard none from any other quarter. Just be grateful that Master Nero himself thought to look here.’

‘But when he recovers,’ Totho said, ‘they’ll. ’

Drephos finished for him grimly. ‘Take him? Question him? Torture him and then enslave or kill him? Yes, they will, for that is their way. A waste of healing, in my opinion.’

‘I do not even recognize that sentiment,’ Norsa snapped at him, ‘although if you were the patient I might make an exception, Colonel-Auxillian.’

Totho glanced from Drephos to Nero, and then back across the room to the unconscious Salma, and realized that some part of his mind had a plan and a decision already prepared for him.

‘Colonel Drephos,’ he said, although he had found his thought already. ‘I need to speak with you. I think you know what about.’

*

Salma drifted in and out of wakefulness. Sometimes he recalled who he was, where he was, and sometimes he did not, perhaps blessedly. He existed in a blurred greyness that was pulled taut between the light of Grief in Chains and the darkness of the void that was still hungry for him.

On one occasion he opened his eyes and found himself looking straight into the face of the man on the next bed. He was a Wasp-kinden with his head bandaged low so as to cover one eye, the wrappings crisp and clean, having just been changed. When he saw Salma looking at him, the other man grinned weakly.

‘You,’ he said, in a voice just loud enough for Salma to hear, ‘are so cursed lucky.’

Salma tried to make a sound, but nothing audible came out. In truth he did not feel so very lucky.

‘You should be dead,’ the soldier continued, his whispering voice obviously the best he could manage. ‘I saw you drop. You were fighting like a maniac but someone got you, and you fell, and that should have been the end of you. I was behind. I saw the point come clean through you, you bastard. She came for you, though, and you were dead, even then, but she came for you as though she knew what had been going on. She ran out and lit the place up and put her hands on you. And you stopped bleeding, right there and then.’ He coughed, a wretched, scratchy sound. ‘And she’s been with you every day, using her Art to keep you alive. I don’t know what you mean to her but you’re a lucky bastard, so you are.’

Salma tried to speak again, and this time a distant croak emerged, quieter even than the wounded soldier’s. ‘I came here for her.’

The man’s one eye studied him for a minute, before he said, ‘Well she’s certainly worth that.’

‘Salma?’

He had been asleep, or at least drifting somewhere else, but there was a new voice now, and it carried his name to him.

‘Salma, you have to wake up now.’

It was not her voice and he did not want to wake up. When he had opened his eyes last, she had been standing there, staring at him. Expression was hard to fathom from those dancing colours, from those eyes, but his heart had leapt painfully just to see her.

He had found her. She had found him. In this mad, war-struck world, they had found each other.

She had sat down at the edge of his bed and, although it was a flimsy folding piece that should have tipped immediately, she barely moved it, making him doubt his senses. He had reached out, though, and she had taken his cold hand in both her warm ones, warm like the sun on a summer’s day.

‘Why are you here?’ she had asked him. ‘Why did you come?’

‘I couldn’t stay away, knowing that you were here,’ was his whisper. ‘Aagen. I spoke to Aagen.’

‘Did you-?’

‘No. We parted on good terms.’ His voice was strengthening, as though healing energies were passing through her hands and into him. Perhaps they were, either by Ancestor Art or by plain magic.

‘You should not have come.’

The ghost of his old smile appeared briefly. ‘Why?’

‘You are hurt. You were already in the hands of death when I found you. All I have done since barely kept you with me.’

‘But I am with you.’ He was staring at her face. She was beautiful and it was not merely the ordinary human beauty of Tynisa. She was Butterfly-kinden and they were beautiful with the timeless perfection of a sunset or a spring day. He yearned for her even though she was already there right beside him.

She had shaken her head. ‘Then I myself have done this to you. I never intended this.’

‘No-’ But something had come to mind, something the Moth-kinden man had said, or that Che had claimed on his behalf. ‘They said. did you enchant me? Is this. what I feel now, just glamour?’

Her hand had touched his face and he felt a warmth flooding there, and also peace and safety. ‘I put a spell on you,’ she had confirmed. ‘We were penned there as slaves, before the great machines of the Wasps, and I saw your face and knew you were a good man. I needed the help of a good man so I put a spell on you, that still held strong when we were taken by their devices to the city of the slaves. But then you needed help yourself, and I took my spell away. I have no spell on you now.’

Staring at her, he had not known what to think, because his heart still reached for her and he wanted to touch her, to stroke that rainbow skin.

‘Then I must love you,’ he had said in wonderment, and realized that all this while some part of him had believed Che’s claim that it was no more than a spell that made him act this way. Now he discovered it was him, nothing but his own heart.

‘Salma! Please wake up!’

He snapped from the reverie — and saw she was not here. Instead there was a man standing by his bed, and it took Salma rather too long to recognize his face.

‘Totho.?’

‘Yes, Salma, it’s me.’

‘What. what in the world are you wearing?’

Salma registered the tunic Totho now wore, black, and edged with strips of black and gold. It was crossed with two leather belts, one for his tools and the other serving as a baldric for his sword.

‘Listen to me, Salma, because we don’t have much time,’ said Totho. ‘You have to listen and understand what I’m saying. I’m getting you out.’

‘Out?’

‘Out of here. Because the girl might have saved your life, but you’re still not safe. In fact if you stay here you’ll certainly die. The Wasps are just waiting until you’re well enough to interrogate.’ Totho gave a brief bark of laughter in which the strain he was under emerged clear enough. ‘What a world! They’re waiting for your wound to heal so they can tear you apart. You know how much they hate your kinden. Half of their men here fought in your Twelve-Year War.’

‘So be it,’ said Salma tiredly.

‘No! Not so be it! Aren’t you listening, Salma? I’ve bought you out. There’s a man, an artificer here, and he wants my service, and he says he can get you out of here.’

‘You trust him?’

‘Enough for this, at least. You remember Nero? Nero’s going with you. He’ll look after you until you’re strong again.’

‘I can’t leave, Totho.’

Totho glowered at him. ‘It’s the girl? That dancing girl? Listen, Salma, they are going to kill you, as slowly as they can. Would she want that? Because she won’t be able to stop them. This nursing order of hers might get to choose whose wounds it heals, but it’s got no such say over the fit and well. I’ve paid the asking price, Salma. I’ve sold myself just to buy you life.’

‘No!’ The effort racked Salma with pain, and he knew that everyone down the length of the hospital tent