Hearts in Zenith (Four Husbands and a Lover)

37. My Curse

She poured a salve over the burn and my tears spurted anew. Talk about cure being worse than affliction!

"If pain is what keeps me conscious, between the flesh-eating burn and stinging salve, I'm good for now." Even to my ears my speech was slurred. "No more, please."

Ondrey bent low, his lips in a solicitous smile, trying to catch every word. He must have understood, because he squeezed his eyes shut, against tears.

"Your soul won't latch on like a hook on a button," Yadwiga said.

From Ondrey's twisted face, I didn't expect better news. So, that's how I die.

I kissed my teeth. "Did we win?"

"Yes," he said. "I saw a small contingent of riders break free to flee to Ratne, as I carried you, but Miccola would chop them into goulash."

Yadwiga's wrinkles multiplied when she frowned. They could have covered a thousand prunes and there would have been leftovers. "Stop wasting time, children. Ishmara, there is a ritual—"

"What?" I breathed out. Green slowed down its assault at the corners of my vision. I searched the air for Yadwiga with a hand dangling at the end of my wrist like overcooked cabbage. And I came to hate overcooked cabbage with a passion. "What ritual?"

"A new life planted under your heart. Use the Divine-given power of womanhood to quicken the womb--and your soul will be strong enough to find its way back to your child."

It took two for this cure to happen, so I turned to Ondrey instead of Yadwiga.

"I can barely see you... and I had never asked for a life-giver's blessing," I said, just as his fingers squeezed my shoulder.

He said, "I won't ask for anything."

Yadwiga tut-tutted us. "I'll perform fertility rites to help you conceive, but you must decide before your soul wanders away again. Quickly, child, quickly."

Ondrey scooped me up at the same time as I sank towards the grabby hair of the underwater maidens in my second reality.

"Don't slip away, Ismar," he said from afar. "Don't die on me."

The resentment was hard to hold onto in the calming waters of oblivion, but I scraped shreds of it together the best I could. "Hadn't you already said sorry for killing me? Why do farewells scare you now?"

Ondrey whispered, "I said sorry for breaking the promise to come back. It had never occurred to me that death could touch you, only me. I saw the aura of Mythra around you as clear as the light of day."

Well, for me the light of day wasn't clear. His form silhouetted against the glow of the distancing Knowable World.

"Fall like a leaf," the maidens sang, "dissolve and disappear. Be born anew."

To the River Vash with the River Vash!

"We'll do it," I screamed to make sure that my physical body's lips at least flapped.

Yadwiga said something. Both realities swirled together, rotating around Ondrey's nose as if it were a wheel's axle.

The next thing I knew, we were in the familiar interior of Yadwiga's cabin.

The purring cat sat on my chest, while Yadwiga squeezed my nose to pour the last dregs of bitter-and-sour drought into my mouth. The rest of it had already scoured my esophagus raw on its way to my stomach. It was marginally better than the hot iron, but still!

"Mythra's fangs, does anyone in Tverizh have taste buds?" I whined.

Ondrey looked back from pulling a dividing curtain shut for a modicum of modesty. Three to one room, it was better than the uncounted poor had every day of their lives in the crowded slums.

The tiny room on both sides of that flimsy screen was so full of burning candles—candles in silver candelabras and clay bowls and earthenware mugs and at least six of them in a wolf's skull— that I imagined his gesture was useless. Nice, but useless. The shadows would tell all.

The way I felt, the story wouldn't be long. The disgusting potion brought me to consciousness, but I needed nearly all my strength to stay close enough to the surface of that other reality to touch Ondrey.

"Don't expect to find a fiery lover in me tonight," I warned him.

Yadwiga clicked her tongue. "Do you understand the rites you must perform before the fiery anything?"

"Yes, yes! How hard could it be? It's the Divine gift to womanhood, so I just..." I trailed off.

True enough, matrons and priestess yammered on and on about the Divine gift that uplifted humanity from the chaos of the Primordial strife after the First Cataclysm. I even thought of unlocking my womb once or twice when Kozima was particularly sweet. But it's one thing to be told that you can invite a new life into being, it's quite another to actually do it.

By the expression in Yadwiga's eyes, she had seen young women falter the same way I'd just did. Perhaps the natural rite was not all that natural for every woman.

"Be determined," Yadwiga advised quietly, "want nothing but to create. Before you take Ondrey you must feel the surge of energy through your womb. That, you won't miss. If in doubt--wait for it."

She scooped up the protesting cat, bless her soul, and disappeared behind the curtain. A rocking chair screeched, then she started up a chant. At a murmur at first, then it grew to reverberate from the cabin's walls.

Ondrey sat down next to me and wrapped me in an embrace—tight for him, flitting for me. I pushed my arms through the wet clay of my double world, because I didn't mean to let him go, forcing my unbending neck to lay my cheek on his shoulder.

The clarity loomed within reach. I wanted to live, I wanted Ondrey. I loved life no matter how ugly it got, even though the Scriptures frowned on the women of war.

The Divines weren't much different from me. Sure, They were neither female nor male and They were both, but they quarreled. They erred. They fought and feasted. And with all that, They had created the Knowable World from the ashes of the stars they had broken in the Primordial Cataclysm.

Mythra led me to victory this morning, They wouldn't let me die this afternoon. In Their name after so many had died, I would create life, and win my own back.

I would not be beaten today, because I wanted to live.

I wanted!

"Let's die some other time," I told Ondrey.

A bright flash blinded me, giving me jitters beyond anything I had felt before. The energy of the sun and every star in the sky flooded to my loins. Somewhere beneath me, in the River Vash, a purified soul stirred from its slumber. I was ready to conduct it back to the Knowable World and bring forth a new life.