Blue Skirt

The room is full of black specks again. I try to bat them away but can’t find my right arm. I search but find only the left one. It’s shackled to the wall. I stare at it for a moment, considering, then decide that it’s too far from me anyway. I pull in a lungful of air and forcefully blow it out. The specks don’t budge. I blow on them again, harder, but that only hurts someone’s ribs. I don’t think the ribs are mine.

“What’s he doing?” asks a voice from in front of me… behind me? Above? I don’t recognize it.

“Dunno. Don’t care.”

“Gotta keep him conscious. He ain’t gonna tell the Baron much when he’s like that.”

“What’s I to do if he’s lost it? Bring a healer here?”

The voice grunts noncommittally, and I stop trying to clear away the black specks, cowering where I sit, making myself small. I might not have recognized the words, but I know the grunt immediately. It’s the sound that always follows a punch to a nose or a jaw. Smack — then red, red pain. My nose? My jaw? A tongue finds a fresh gap in a row of teeth only to pull away from it as fast as thought does. No. No. No. I don’t know the voice. I don’t know the teeth. 

The iron door to the cell screeches open. I hide in my knees. They are mountains.

“Look up, boy.” I don’t. I let the mountains shelter me. “Boy? Shit. Look at me.”

The mountains tremble, rattling me with them. I wonder if the earthquake might shake the voice off, but a hand closes around the back of my neck and jerks my head back, tilting it to the dim light — that’s alright, my head is far away from me too. I squeeze someone else's eyes shut for them. There aren’t any specks in the darkness.

But the hand wants the dark for itself. It sets two sweaty fingers on my face and tries to pry open my left eye. I whimper. The hand smells bad. But it doesn’t let up until I glimpse a scarred face I’ve tried my best to forget. I whimper again.

“His pupils are almost as wide as the eyes! What the fuck did you do to him, Hav?”

“Nothing.”

“Nothing? If you weren’t the one who'd beat him up, I'd have thought you drugged him against pain. Out of mercy or something.”

“Not pain, Morly.”

“Huh?”

“Not pain,” the voice repeats with an odd hesitance. “To stop…err…”

The guard peels my other eye open, examines it, and nods grimly, her gaze running up and down my entire frame and snagging briefly on the broken ankle. I can see the pretty white of the protruding bone there, but decide that mountains need snow at the base and smile. Snow is good. Snow isn’t red. “Stop what? His weeping? You’re getting soft.”

The voice coughs, “Nah, not that…. The mutterin'.”

The hand finally drops me to the floor — I feel like I land there from a great distance — and the guard sounds both disgusted and distant when she speaks again. “You can’t be that dense. He's just a thief that was stupid enough to steal from the Baron. You don’t really believe he's got the Old Craft?”

“Well…”

“Do it again, and I’ll report you.”

There’s no answer, or maybe there is, but I forget what words are. I huddle against my wall and stare down the black specks. The hand does not return to prod me again and I soon forget it. The specks stare back, laughing.

*****

The first thing the slow parting of the drug reveals is the hard stone. There is nothing between the cold floor and my battered skin save the filthy threadbare rags I wear, and the stone finds, prods and presses on every raw wound. I shift and try to find the least painful position, but the shackles don’t allow much movement. I curl into a ball.

Pain is the second thing that comes to haunt me from the fog, and when it emerges fully, a low keening moan fills the cell, soaking the frigid stones. It takes me a moment to recognize myself as its source. I try biting on my lower lip to stifle the sound, but discover it’s already been chewed up — the guard took some time administering the analgesic after the beating, then. Out of mercy or something, indeed. I try to grit my teeth instead, but there are too few, and the slick absences hurt as much as the loose molars that still hang on. Some of them keep oozing blood on my tongue, bitter and metallic. I consider spitting, but think better of it. I can’t sacrifice the moisture.

Breathe, just breathe, I counsel myself, but anything save the shallowest of breaths spreads a sharp web of agony down my sides and arms. I venture a guess at the number of broken ribs. Five? Six? I keep inhaling deeply anyway. In and out. In and out. Slowly. It’s not the worst of my aches. I spend some time deciding which is but that too, I quickly give over as useless. The ankle is the sharpest, the throbbing in my head is the closest, the chafed wrist is simply ever-present and nagging.

None of that knowledge is going to get me out of here. I wonder grimly if there is a way I can walk on one leg.

I’m still wondering that when the world tilts. I try to grab at the floor, but it’s greased with my blood. Reality slips out from under me. 

I sleep or faint. I flee.

*****

When I come to the second time, I am terrified that I am blind. But no, it’s just night in the world that’s no longer mine. A flicker of moonlight filters through the streaked filthy glass of the narrow window beneath the ceiling, and a warm glow of a candle sneaks in from underneath the door. Neither is enough to see my own hands. Good.

Slowly, so slowly, I readjust my position on the floor to sprawl on my stomach. Several eternities pass before I manage to crawl a foot of space to the wall and hoist myself to a sitting position against it. My hands are shaking with the effort or maybe the cold, but I do not make a single sound. There’ll be time for that.

Instead, I focus on the glittering thread of gold that twines with the stone on the opposite side of the cell, visible to no eyes but mine. I’ve woven and left it there before the superstitious guard heard me casting the spell and drugged me senseless. It wasn’t finished. I wonder tiredly if it should be. Even if I manage to pull it off and break the wall, what then? There’s still the chains, and the guards, and the broken ankle. The fatigue, the hunger, the thirst, the walls of the prison outside, the maze of the unfamiliar fortress, the dark, and the ruthless bite of Northern winter. Next to that, the solid wall of the cell seems flimsy.

And I’ll only get one chance. The moment they learn I do have the Old Craft, they’ll cut out my tongue or finally kill me. I do not look forward to either option. Yet.

So I sit still and stare at the gold-threaded stone, trying to find another solution. My somber silence and the quiet of the dead night is what makes it possible. A voice sifts through the stone, “Vint? Vint, are you there?”

My head flies up — a mistake, since the sudden motion jerks at all my pains — but I do manage to look up at the slit of the window directly above me. I couldn’t have reached it if I jumped, so I make no move to stand up on the one good leg. Instead, I coax sound into my parched throat and dare a whisper, “Lessie?”

“Yes! Vint, oh, Vint, we thought we’d never find you!” Something wrenches sideways in my chest at the joyous relief in her voice, and the darkness blurs for a moment. I blink the tears away. Sobbing will only anger the pain in my chest.

“How?” I rasp.

“We followed the Baron, of course. We knew he would want to… question you personally.”

I glance at the ankle I can’t see. That he did.

“How long?” I ask.

Lessie understands. “Twelve days.”

That shocks me. It’s hard to measure time in here, and the third silent guard who is still human enough to pale each time she glances at me, occasionally brings me water, but I don’t remember eating once… Which explains a lot.

Lessie calls down, “Are you alright?”

Such a question.

“Oh, Vint,” Lessie whispers when I don’t say anything. I can hear my answer in her tone. “It’s going to be fine now. We’ll get you out.”

I picture her perching on a branch of some tree or a makeshift ladder she has hauled over to reach the window, her favorite black-dotted blue skirt whipping around her in the wind, cheeks red from both exertion and the rough kiss of the winter. Moonlight strikes glints off her golden hair. She does not belong inside the cell. The wall between us can as well be a border to the underworld.

“No, Lessie,” I say softly. “This cell is too small for two. Leave.”

My words do nothing to dissuade her. “Listen. Just listen. It took us forever to break into the prison. Finn is here too. We have prepared an escape route, and all is ready at a minute’s notice,” she sucks in a nervous breath. “The only issue is your chains. The key is with the Baron himself, and we can’t get to him. We tried. Can you… break them?” With the Craft, she means. Even Lessie, a friend I deservedly call best, isn’t comfortable speaking of my talents aloud. 

“I don’t know,” I tell her honestly. “It will have to be a slicing spell, and those take a lot of power when they must cut through something as hard as metal.”

“Do what you can. A patrol is returning, so I must go. I’ll come tomorrow evening. Be ready.” 

I hear her blue skirt brush the wall as she starts climbing down. Swish.

“Lessie?” I call, suddenly terrified of being left alone again. 

“What?”

I grope after the words, but can’t find them. Perhaps there aren’t any that are adequate enough.

“Thank you,” I say softly.

I can hear her smile. “You can magic me a drink later.”

More swishing of the skirt and the night falls still again. I let out a shuddering breath, lick my mutilated lips, rub some warmth into my hands, and allow myself a moment of grateful prayer.

Then I get to work.

*****

“He’s mutterin' again,” complains the male guard outside my cell. Hav? I can hear him walking up and pressing an ear against the heavy metal door two feet away. I don’t break the spell, speaking the ancient words clearly but quietly. I’m exhausted. I think it’s been a few hours since I’ve started, and there is now a second golden thread glowing in the cell, twisted and coiled loosely around my hands. I would have woven it straight through the chains, but the angle is too awkward. I’ll have to slice through them in one decisive motion when Lessie gets here. The power feels warm in my hands. A tiny secret fire. 

“He’s probably raving,” says Morly, the guard who has checked on me before. I worry she’ll enter the cell and break my concentration. She doesn’t. “The Baron will cure that soon enough.”

It was indeed soon. 

They opened the cell, unlocked the chains, and hauled me into the torture room again. They broke my last ankle. I screamed. Not for long, I don’t think. I bellowed my consciousness out with my pain.

But I didn’t waste the spell. Wound gracefully around my fingers, its golden glow was the last thing I saw before the Baron lost his crushing grip on me.

*****

“Here, boy,” someone holds up my head to lap liquid against my mouth. The rim of the cup clatters twice against my remaining teeth, but I manage to swallow. “Good. Steady now. Steady. I’m sorry,” fingers caress my hair, my face, “I’m so sorry. I can’t watch this anymore. I’ve stolen this from Hav. It helped you last time.” There is apology, and pain, and fear in the voice, but I’m sure I’ve never heard it before. “Morly might report me, but I don’t care.” I feel numbness spreading out from my center, until even the throb of the ankles becomes but a distant tingle. I smile gratefully.

“Thank you,” I mouth to the kind heart. “Thank you.”

*****

There is an unusual sound when the door opens. Swish-swish-swish behind the screech. I don’t like it. It reminds me of something I should know.

“Vint?” A voice calls. “By the Gods, what have they done to you? Vint, it’s me.”

I do not open my eyes. The black specks are hunting me, and will attack if I break cover. I am not defenseless this time, but they don’t know that. I grin.

“Vint? Please, look at me,” a hand touches my face and I recoil through the wall. The wall likes me. It’s friendly.

“Please.”

Something in the voice — pleading? — breaks through to me for a moment, and I consider. Maybe I can peek. My eyelids have strong legs. Ankles? There’s something important about the ankles. They are fast. Yesss. Go!

My eyelids jump up, out of the way — and I freeze in horror.

Black specks are everywhere. They have infiltrated and marred my sky. Black on blue, black on blue, black on blue.

Golden!

The spell in my hands flashes blindingly bright as I hurl it at the dots. Slicing through all of them. There is a scream. There is a thud.

The specks fall. 

So does the sky.

I punch a fist in the air. I win!

I laugh. 

I curl up in the spreading puddle. Ahhh. It’s been so long since I’ve been warm. Even the stone melts. It’s not hard anymore and makes swish-swish-swish sounds when I move on it. Perhaps, red is not such a bad color, after all.