The other lands

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Mena awoke with a hot hand grasping her skull, searing her where it squeezed. She was on her side, and when she tried to swat the thing she realized through a rush of pain that her left forearm was broken. In the dim light of the predawn hour she stared at the strange droop of the limb, bent where it should have been straight, limp where it should have been firm. It was most definitely broken. Realizing that, she also knew that no physical being held her. It was just the pain from bashing her head on stones in the hillside. The burning on her thigh was from an impact abrasion. The soreness in her shoulder was from when she had dislocated it. She remembered the complete agony of it and the sweetness of relief when the tumbling motion of her fall had reset it. The rawness in her throat was from sleeping in the jumbled position in which she landed, with her mouth open to the dry rasp of a Talayan breeze. She knew a lot of things, but they were so cluttered in her head that she could not grasp the entirety of it.

Instead, she focused on a small thing. The little finger of her left hand had snapped at the base and canted off to the side in defiance of its siblings. It was red and swollen and did not really seem to belong with the others. It was a minor injury in some ways, but the unnatural shape of it captured all Mena's attention, forced her to focus through the pounding bands squeezing her skull. Slowly, she reached out and took the finger in the palm of her other hand. She held it a long moment, awed at how fat it felt. Then she twisted it back into position. As it popped into place she exhaled a jagged curse-not so much at the finger as at the searing splinters of pain that shot up her forearm and into her shoulder and throughout her entire body.

She lay on her back, breathing, holding still so that the pain might forget her and slip away. The gray sky above her was scalloped with high clouds tinted pink by the rising sun. They looked soft. They reminded her of something. As she tried to think what, a few moments passed, and then she raised herself awkwardly. Things to do. She had things to do. Despite and because of her pain, she had things to do.

Over the next hour, Mena limped about, gathering the supplies she would need to splint her arm. There were no trees nearby, and she did not yet want to raise her eyes and look beyond her immediate surroundings. Instead, she found several slim lengths of stone, along with ribbons of mossy turf that she sliced one-handed with her short sword. She was not far from a small stream. Its gentle gurgle called to her, and she hobbled toward it, cringing at the thirsty convulsions of her parched throat.

She stood beside the stream for a longer moment than she wished, unsure whether to drink from it or tend her arm first. Eventually, she did both. She unbuckled her sword belt, let it drop, and contorted her way out of her clothing. She stepped into one of the deeper pools wearing only her eel pendant, the one she had found gripped in a child's withered hand at the base of Maeban's aerie. The water bit her with cold, but that was good. She would be wet all over, but that was good, too, good to wash the filth and sweat and blood from her body. Letting her broken arm float, she scooped fingerfuls of water into her mouth with her right hand. She did so slowly, pausing to breathe between swallows, not rushing.

When she was as numb as she could bear, she crawled from the stream and-still naked and grateful for the touch of the morning sun-tended her arm. The flesh was not broken, but she could see the misshapen bone beneath her skin, which was bruised in blooms of ugly blue and green and red and yellow. Laying the limb on the ground, she worked around it, a one-armed being caring for a separate entity to which she was bound. She positioned the moss as padding, and lined the stones around it to make a splint. She used a length of string from her waist to bind it tight, a slow, slow process that left her fingers aching, hard as it was to tie with only one hand. She pulled on her left hand as she pressed the splint down with her chin, an attempt at straightening the bone, and then tightened the strings again.

By the time she was finished-dressed again, with the arm in a sling fashioned from the long ribbon of fabric that had been her belt-the sun was high and strong, and she was sweating from her efforts. Was the bone set straight? She could not be sure, but it was the best she could do. She might have looked to her small injuries as well, but that would just be avoidance of the more important thing. She knew these actions were small details, delays before she faced what she had to face. Her body would be bruised and battered for some time, but with the arm splinted she had no reason not to raise her eyes and look for it-for the foulthing.

Climbing up to a ridgeline and trudging along it toward a higher vantage, Mena took in the country around her. It was a temperate landscape of sharp, grass-covered hills. The soil was shallow, and the rocky frames of the slopes protruded here and there. She could not be sure, but she thought they had flown west, into the hills of northern Talay, perhaps not far from Nesreh and the western coast. She remembered glimpsing the sea on the distant horizon. That was before the beast-and she with it-had crashed to the earth in fatigue.

What a strange flight that had been. It had gripped her, hadn't it? Or had she gripped it? Had it wanted her with it, or had she wanted to be with it? She was not sure. She would have thought it a dream if the world around her were not so real and the pains in her body were not so acute. She remembered the moment it yanked her into the air, the way the earth fell away, as if she and the beast were motionless, but everything and everyone below them had suddenly dropped. At least, that's one way she remembered it.

On the other hand, she remembered the incredible, ear-battering sound of it. She had clawed up the tail like it was a rope. Up and before her, the foulthing flew. The beast itself had been silent, but everything else was a confusion of noise and wind, of flapping wings and erratic flight. The swinging weights smashed into her several times before she got her short sword free and managed to cut several of the ropes. This made it easier for the foulthing, she knew, but any one of those stones could have brained her. Besides, the creature did not truly seem to have much life in it. Each wing-beat was a display of power, but between them came long moments in which the wings seemed on the verge of dropping. She clung to the flying creature, sure that they would come crashing down any second, near enough that her troops would never lose sight of her.

The creature was more resilient than she knew, however. The undulating hills of Talay passed far below her, scrolling beneath them as they flew and flew on. Acacia trees became tiny blooms, rivers like lines on a map, her view that of an eagle looking down on a world laid out beneath it. She was not sure how much time passed like that. Hours, perhaps. A few times she believed it was Maeben above her. She thought she heard that great goddess's angry screech. It didn't make sense, not unless she had fallen into a dream. But how could she have done that when she was clinging for her life? Unless the beast really was holding on to her.

The last moments of the flight had brought them into this high country. She thought they were getting lower, but in fact the plateau and the hills upon it rose to meet them. She saw what she took to be the gray bulk of the sea in the distance, and then focused on the hills, the rocks, the pinnacles that grew closer and closer. The creature, it seemed, did not have the strength to rise higher. Its flight grew even more erratic, frantic one moment and slow the next, making them rise and fall. She thought she was going to smash into one rock face, only to be saved when the beast surged above it. Passing over it, Mena touched her feet to the stone in a quick scamper across its surface. She loosened her hand, considering letting go of the tail. Before she did she was airborne again.

The beast had dipped into the next ravine, and as it rose to fight its way over the coming slope, Mena felt her hand slide. Of course she could not hold on forever. Perhaps the beast was letting go of her. The sleek muscles of the tail grew limp in her hand. This time, as the creature just managed to clear the knuckle of rock that topped the ridge, Mena touched her feet to the vertical wall of stone but did not have the strength to hold on. The tail slipped from her grip. For a moment she was held there, her two feet on the stone, her body horizontal to the world, suspended in brief defiance of the earth's pull. Her last sight of the foulthing was from beneath it, as its shadow skimmed across the outcrop of stones and vanished, its tail snapping as it disappeared. She heard Maeben's shrill cry again, and then the earth remembered her. It pulled on her and all was the painful battering of her tumbling fall down the slope. Had she not been so exhausted-her body as limp as a doll's-she might not have survived it.

As she took the last steps up to the summit, a thought rose in her. Perhaps she had been the one crying out, Maeben's fury leaping from her mouth. She did not consider this long, however. She crested the peak and took in a panorama of similar hills stretching out all around her, until her eyes tilted downward and found it. It was there, where she suspected it would be. The beast lay sprawled in the next ravine, its wings flung wide and stained bloody from the many bolt piercings and tears, its body twisted and its tail in looping disarray, tangled among the ropes and weights still knotted around it. It looked broken, dead. Mena felt a knot draw tight in her abdomen. She started down toward it, approaching slowly, trying not to kick stones loose.

As she neared it, she drew her long sword. She wasn't truly afraid; the action was instinctive. In truth, the creature seemed much smaller than she remembered. It was less bulky when contrasted to some of the foulthings she had fought, but it was not a creature whose strength should be measured by its bulk. With its lithe torso and the slim, extended proportions of its tail and the confusion of finger-thin bones and membranes that were its wings, it was hard for her to compare it to anything she had seen before. Such an awkward position it lay in, bent around the stones. Its head was upside down, the soft part of its neck exposed. There was so much to it. It hurt Mena just looking at the wounds, the tears, the places where blood had smeared or pooled. The last of the foulthings. Dead.

"They told me you were a dragon," she said, "but you're no dragon. You're a foulthing… but you're not. I'm not sure what you are, but you're no monster."

She had spoken softly, without realizing she was doing so. In the silence afterward she looked around, embarrassed lest she was heard talking to a dead beast. But there was nobody around, not for miles. She thought, for the first time, of Melio and the soldiers who would be frantically searching for her. She knew she should do something to help them: walk back toward the east perhaps, find a settlement or build a signal fire somehow. But looking at the lizard bird, she did not want to. They would find her no matter what she did. She had that faith in them.

Instead, she let her eyes drift over every inch of the creature. It must have been female, she thought. The curves of her neck were sensual, dramatic in her death posture. Mena stepped close and ran her fingers over her. She was soft to the touch, warmed by the heat of the sun. Her coat was close to the skin, something like feathered scales, hued in soft, creamy tones. There was a pattern woven across them, an intricate interlacing that Mena could not get her eyes to fully focus on. It seemed to change even as she studied it.

"My sister would have envied this coat," she said. Thinking that, she was saddened that she was the one who would deliver it to her.

Corinn would not have envied the damage done to the creature, though. Each wound turned Mena's stomach. She couldn't stand the sight of them, and suddenly she couldn't stand the thought that the others would see the creature like this, her beauty so fouled by the weapons that Mena herself had called into play. Without really deciding to, Mena began to do what she could to hide the damage. She pulled free the crossbow bolts and flung them away. She untangled the ropes and dragged the stone weights down the ravine. She cradled the creature's tail and let it flow out to its full length.

In particular, she worked to gently arrange the wondrous wings. She remembered them as they had been when they first unfurled, so shocking, amazing in their breadth and their deceptively delicate power. It was hard to twin those images with the ragged things she worked to sort out. The bones that framed the wings hardly seemed capable of what she had witnessed. They were as limp as a thousand broken finger bones slipped inside a thin tube of skin. Mena could pick the wings up and arrange them like tattered sheets. The membrane of the wings was just as diaphanous as it appeared, leathery and supple both. It had an oily resin on it. The stuff felt funny on her fingers. It tingled, seemed to course through her fingertips. It smelled faintly of… She wasn't sure what it smelled of, but there was something familiar in it, something comforting. It made it slightly easier to stick together the ripped fabric of the membrane and to feel it might just mend, or at least look like it had.

Mena was at this for some time, working one-armed, stumbling because of her own injuries and fatigue. She could not help but speak to the creature. She kept apologizing, commenting on her features, talking as if she were a nurse and the patient simply holding to silence. Perhaps, she said, not all changed creatures should die. Perhaps she should have taken the time to see this one first. She wished she had.

Eventually, she had dealt with everything but the creature's head. Before she turned to it, she thought she would touch it with care. Lift and twist it over, set it right. She could do that. She would. She owed it that. So thinking, she turned and froze at what she saw.

The creature's head-which had been upside down-was now right side up. Her eyes were open. She was watching her.