Distant tales of the Dichotomy

Fel woke to the smell of crushed mint and boiled iron.

His first thought was that he had died. His second was that death had surprisingly good pillows. The third thought arrived with the pain, which came in slowly and politely, like a debt collector, and then all at once. His ribs burned, his eyes felt as though they had been scrubbed with sand, and his ears rang with a thin, high note that refused to leave.

He was lying in a long, vaulted room carved out of grey stone, lined with two rows of narrow cots, most of them empty. Pale blue lamps hung from the ceiling, their flames burning without a single flicker, and the shelves along the walls sagged under jars of things that were better off unnamed. Bundles of dried herbs dangled from the rafters like hanged men. At the far end of the room, someone had painted a window on the wall, complete with a sunrise, and someone had clearly put a great deal of love into the lie.

“Don’t sit up.”

The voice was low, unhurried, and amused. Fel turned his head slowly. A woman sat on the edge of the neighboring cot with a stone mortar in her lap, grinding something that smelled like a swamp’s revenge.

She was a dark elf. Fel knew that much from the stories. Her skin was the deep grey-violet of a fading bruise, and her ears were long, pointed, and lined from tip to lobe with tiny silver rings that chimed whenever she moved her head. Her hair was white as milk, shaved close on the left side and braided thickly over her right shoulder, and her eyes were the color of weak tea held up to a candle. She was tall even sitting, and lean in the way of someone who was always on her feet, dressed in a black wool dress under a grey apron stained with every color a human body could produce. Her sleeves were rolled to the elbow, revealing forearms crossed with fine white scars, as if she had been bitten by very small, very organized animals.

“Your ribs are being held together by thread and gossip,” she said, “so let’s not test either. I’m Karmina. This is the Nightfall Wing, and I am the reason you still have eyes. Try not to make me regret it.”

“How long…” Fel’s voice came out like a rusted hinge.

“Four days.” She set down the mortar, poured something green-black from a kettle into a wooden cup, and slid a hand behind his neck to lift his head with startling gentleness. “Master Boru carried you in himself, which is the second strangest thing I have ever seen him do. The first was humming.”

Fel drank. It tasted like the inside of a boot.

“It tastes like a boot,” he croaked.

“It tastes like the boot that saved your life. Finish it.”

He finished it.

She held a small lamp in front of his face and moved it left, then right, then up, watching his pupils with a frown that softened by degrees. “They were silver when they carried you in. Every last bit of them, no white left. Now they’re brown again, mostly. Mostly is the part I don’t like.”

“Where are my swords?”

Karmina tilted her head toward the table beside the wall. The golden saber rested on a rack, still in its black scabbard. The other lay flat under a length of black cloth, like a body no one wanted to identify.

“I haven’t touched that one,” she said. “The last healer who handled a saint-tier blade uninvited writes with her left hand now, and she complains about it constantly.”

Fel let his head fall back onto the pillow and stared at the ceiling. The lamps did not flicker. Nothing in this room seemed to be afraid of anything.

“In four days of raving,” Karmina said mildly, dabbing a cold, sharp-smelling salve along the bruises on his jaw, “you said one word about three hundred times.”

He went still.

“Silence,” she said. “Over and over. Sometimes like a name, sometimes like a plea.” She watched his face. “You can tell me why you talk to your sword in your sleep, or you can drink your second cup and let me pretend I didn’t hear. I’ve patched a thousand candidates in this room, little TeneDente. Most of them were numbers by the time they reached me. Yours is a four, but you came in with a name. Names are heavy things down here. Choose who you hand yours to.”

Fel drank the second cup.

“Good,” said Karmina, and there was something almost like approval in it. “Then listen, because I’ll say this once, and I have it on good authority that repeating oneself is a sin in this place. That blade takes payment from the body. It took your blood, and next time it will take more if you push it. Do not call on it twice in one day. Do not call on it at all until your ribs have knit. If you must, come to me before the bleeding starts, not after. Understood?”

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“Understood,” Fel said.

“That is the face of a boy who understood nothing.” She sighed and stood, her rings chiming softly. “Good. Honest liars are rare, and I’m fond of them.”

She turned to her shelves, and as she reached for a jar, the scent of clove drifted from her sleeve, warm and sweet and spiced. It smelled like a tavern gown.

It smelled like Tori.

Fel didn’t decide to cry. It simply happened, quietly at first and then not quietly at all, the way a dam gives out. He pressed the heel of his hand against his mouth, furious with himself, and the fury only made it worse. Karmina did not turn around. She did not say a word. She kept her back to him, arranging jars that did not need arranging, and began to hum a slow, low melody in a language he did not know, the little rings in her ears ringing softly along with it like a lullaby made of tiny bells.

She hummed until he stopped.

Then she brought him a third cup, and neither of them mentioned it again.

He spent the next three days learning that being healed was worse than being hurt.

Karmina made him walk the length of the ward twice a day, one hand on the wall, while she counted his breaths out loud and told him his posture looked like a question mark that had lost an argument. She made him eat porridge that tasted like wet wool, and beef broth that tasted like a promise. She taught him to tell a green poultice from a blue one by the smell alone, and refused to teach him what was in either. When he complained, she said he had the vocabulary of a sailor and the stamina of a wet candle. When he stopped complaining, she looked worried and forced another cup into his hands.

On the second day, Vili Wyrnia arrived.

He entered the ward the way he entered every room, as though a herald had gone ahead of him, his golden hair immaculate, his uniform pressed. He was carrying a small tin, which he set on the foot of Fel’s cot with an air of terrible sacrifice.

“Honeyed almonds,” he announced. “A gift from one of my brothers. I loathe him, so I have no idea why I kept them.”

“You came to gloat,” Fel said.

“I came to verify that my competition was still breathing. It would be embarrassing to defeat a corpse.” Vili glanced around the ward with open distaste, then lowered his voice, a little quieter than pride usually allowed. “Master Boru posted the marks. You should know them, since you slept through the ceremony. Ortumo received eleven. I received fourteen.”

“And me?”

Vili’s jaw tightened as if the number tasted bad. “Twenty. For killing an artifact-class being on your first attempt, in a chamber that took the Sanctum’s architects a century to seal. And then bleeding on the floor like a dropped wine cask.” He straightened, brushing his sleeve. “Do not mistake this for admiration. It is arithmetic. Points are points, and I intend to overtake you by Thursday.”

“It’s Sunday,” Fel said.

“Then I have time.” Vili sniffed, turned, and left, and only at the door did he pause, without looking back. “That thing you did. With the stillness. I did not see you move at all.” He seemed to be waiting for Fel to say something clever. When Fel didn’t, Vili left, and the tin of almonds stayed behind. Fel ate every one of them and never admitted it.

On the third night, a new shadow came to the foot of his bed.

He had almost drifted off. The blue lamps had dimmed to their night setting, and Karmina was asleep in the chair by the door with a book open across her lap. Fel opened one eye and found Loria Dusklight Ortumo standing perfectly still at the end of his cot, her braid over one shoulder, her right arm wrapped in gauze from wrist to collar. She did not seem to have made any sound coming in. Her eyes, in the dim light, were two banked coals.

Neither of them spoke for a long time.

“You stopped time,” she said at last. Her voice was flat, dry, tired, the voice of someone who had stopped expecting to be surprised. “I felt it. Like the moment before a sneeze.”

“I don’t know what I did,” Fel said.

“Liar.” There was no heat in it. She looked at the gauze on her arm, then back at him. “That gun nearly ate me. I let it. I wanted to see if I would survive.” A pause. “I did. That is all I have learned.”

Fel wasn’t sure what to say to that. Nobody had ever taught him what to say to someone like her.

“Don’t die before I’m strong enough to kill you,” Loria said.

“That’s the nicest thing anyone has said to me all week.”

The corner of her mouth twitched, as if the muscle had forgotten its job. She reached up, pulled a single black feather from her braid, and laid it on his blanket. Then she turned and walked out, and the door made no sound at all.

Karmina, in her chair, did not turn a page. But Fel could have sworn her eyes were open.

On the fifth morning, a page in Sanctum grey delivered a folded parchment, and Karmina read it with her mouth going thin.

“Commander Kirn,” she said. “‘Candidate Four is to report to the Ossuary Steps at fourth bell. Absence will be recorded as zero points, and zero points are worth a lifetime of Isharv’s affection.’” She crumpled the paper in one fist. “You are not fit.”

“Then patch me,” Fel said.

She stared at him for a long moment. Then she swore in her own language, and it sounded lovely and vicious. She bound his ribs with a strip of silver thread and grey bandage, pulled it tight enough to make him see stars, and pressed a small glass vial into his palm. It held something dark and thick that moved in the light like it was listening.

“Larkblood tincture,” she said. “Two drops on the tongue if the bleeding starts. One full swallow if you stop feeling your fingers, and you will know the moment because it will feel like you’ve been gently unplugged. If you see silver in your reflection, stop.”

“Stop doing what?”

“Whatever you were about to do.”

He slid the vial into his coat. Falling Star stayed on its cloth, and after a moment of thought, he took Krashing Fyr from its rack instead. It felt warm through the scabbard, like a hand that had been waiting for his.

At the door, Karmina caught his sleeve. Her tea-colored eyes were very serious.

“Whatever they’ve built for you down there,” she said, “I have nine empty cots in this wing. I would like to keep them empty.”

Fel nodded once, and went to find out what Kirn had planned for him.