The next days were much the same. Nyasha shut herself up in a back room, absorbed in her work. She was not interested in discussing her progress when she emerged to eat and sleep, which was rarely, and the skin around her eyes gradually darkened as she worked late into the night. Calea was content enough with that. She was the same when she became deeply engrossed in an invention. In a few days, in Thyrion, she would be able to bury herself in magical projects once more.
Dr. Burdock maintained the front of the clinic, seeing patients and keeping up the business of the Sanctuary. He made some deals for food to come in, usually in exchange for his services, and they had bread and salted meat and even a fresh chicken at one point. Occasionally he fussed over Nyasha, who rebuffed him. Then he attempted to discuss an exercise regimen with Calea, and she accepted his counsel a bit more readily, mostly because he offered it as advice instead of a prescription.
Calea was determined to prove Nyasha wrong. By the time the prosthetics were ready, she would be strong and hardy enough for the trip to Thyrion. In that pursuit, the crutch became both her dearest friend and her most hated enemy. It let her move on her own. But after only a few hours of stumping around the clinic, her shoulder and arm burned with unabated pain.
She did not remember it hurting like this when she was a child, newly plunged into the world of the deformed, the crippled, the amputees. But she had been smaller and lighter then, and her remaining limbs had been flush with the vigor of childhood. She had also been in a great deal of shock and confusion, which might have numbed the physical pain somewhat.
Still, Calea persisted in her quest. She would be strong and capable when the time came. Really, the prosthetics were taking much too long. What was that stupid girl doing, anyway? Calea itched to be on the road to Thyrion.
And Bron… Well. Bron was there. Always. He made his rounds of the clinic and sometimes stood near Dr. Burdock, guarding as he promised, especially when suspicious or rowdy characters showed up at the Sanctuary. So far his mere presence had been enough to quiet or send away anyone who made the young doctor start chewing his fingernails. But if Calea stumbled, somehow he was always there, catching her elbow and keeping her from hitting the floor. When she ached, he stood there with tea and a hot water bottle. When she told him to leave, he went into the hall and waited. Just like always.
She remembered that this used to irritate her, back in Jalseion, when she was a Guide. When she was important and feted and admired and envied. Now the world had changed, transformed in a rupture of magic and earth into something crumpled, empty, and terrifyingly new. Calea was changed, too, from one of only half a dozen truly powerful people in the world into a crippled child once again, bereft and alone, nursing her old absences. But Bron was still there, keeping her off the ground and making her tea.
It didn’t irritate her anymore. Well, not as much.
Calea exhausted herself every day, yet the pain kept her awake long into the night, staring at the ceiling of the empty dorm room and trying to ignore the burn of her shoulder and armpit, the tension of the muscles in her forearm and the ache in her thigh. Even her fingers were sore and seized in a claw from gripping the crutch with white-knuckled fervor. If she let herself go, she could almost ride the waves of pain like a dandelion clock in the wind, or a swirl of color in the currents of the Well….
She turned her face to the wall and tried to stop thinking. It was easier to fight than to let go. Easier to struggle and shout and force her way through the walls surrounding her.
A distant sound pierced the veil Calea was trying to pull around herself, and she paused, lifting her head to listen. It was small and childish and nearly wild. It might have been the wind, howling over some distant desert peak. She’d never heard anything so raw and visceral, so guttural and uncouth. It might have been the sound of weeping.
Curiosity drove her out of bed and into an ill-fitting robe, reaching for her crutch even as her shoulder shrieked at the prospect of yet more pain. Calea clenched her teeth and rode it, through the door and down a hall, following the vicious sound of naked emotion. The cry was like a hook driven into her chest, pulling her on. What was it, some sort of animal? A child in the street, alone and frightened? The question drove the pain from her mind, at least for awhile.
She really shouldn’t have been surprised at what she found. They were the only two staying in the women’s dormitory. Yet the sight of the girl pulled Calea up short, halting clumsily several feet away, forced to lean against the wall on her burning shoulder when her crutch slipped. Nyasha sat in a chair at a bay window looking out on the Sanctuary’s garden, bent over herself with her face in her hands, sobbing bitterly as moonlight painted silver over her plaited head and convulsing shoulders.
“What are you doing?” Calea’s voice was harsh and amazed, bursting out of her as if without her consent.
Nyasha gulped, trying to force down her tears. She did not raise her head or even glance Calea’s way, but her shoulders froze, making a wall against the intrusion. “I’m crying,” she spat out, sharp and furious. “Who’s an idiot now?”
“But whatever for?” Calea’s mind was nearly empty, unable to come up with any sort of reason for this horrendous display.
“My…my p-parents…” Nyasha’s voice hitched on a sob. “They’re…they’re dead. I saw them. I saw it! I didn’t understand it. I…” More sobbing, the raw, guttural chokes and gasps of a child’s grief. Had Calea ever made such sounds? She didn’t think so.
“I still don’t,” Nyasha finished, and she just sat there, trying to get herself under control. “I don’t understand it.”
Calea knew, distantly, that this was the part where an ordinary woman of their civilization would try to offer some sort of comfort. She would embrace this messy, mortifying girl, dry her tears, and tell her it would be all right. She would lie and hush and lie some more. She would be warm and soft and gentle, like a bowl of custard left too long in the sun.
“I never knew my parents,” Calea said. Her voice was cold and hard and blunt. She heard it in her voice and could not bring herself to care. “I was sent to the Academy as soon as my talents were discovered. I don’t see what the fuss is about.”
Nyasha drew in a breath, sharp and almost sobbing, but this time it sounded more like fury than sorrow. Calea shook her head and pushed herself off the wall, turning to leave. Behind her, the girl began to cry again, softer than before. Almost brokenly.
Calea went back to her bed. People lived, people died. It happened all the time. It wasn’t worth caring about.
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