THE CUFFS AROUND her wrists had turned frigid the longer they walked. The steel wrapped around her wrists the same way her mother's bronze wristbands always had, though these did not look so pretty and felt even worse. The cuffs themselves were attached to a long pole to keep her hands apart, putting her small body in an uncomfortable position. It was difficult to walk with violently shaking legs and arms pulled apart so wide they might as well have been pulled from their sockets. The broken bone in her arm – she was sure it was broken because of the swelling and the rhythmic aching pain that shot through her – did not help the situation either.
The man that had put the cuffs on her had looked apologetic, a purple robe hanging from his slim frame. He had said something, but Freya did not speak Ravkan well at all and only understood certain words like you or no. Her father had begun teaching her only a few months ago, but he would not be able to do that now.
She was being dragged through the dark woods at the border between Fjerda and Ravka, surrounded by those who had always been an enemy of her people. And he was dead, murdered by the fire-wielding demon when he had tried to free her from their grasp. He hadn't known about her curse. Not like Matthias had. The look in her brother's eyes was still enough to burn a hole in her chest. The tone of his voice as he spat the word drusje at her as if he had not known her most of his life was even worse.
She did not realize she was crying until the tears were wiped away by a gentle hand. For Freya, it seemed everything but. She jerked away from it as her breath hitched and her eyes widened. The woman – from Novyi Zem, Freya noticed – pursed her lips but stepped away.
Freya relaxed when she was far enough away from her. The heavy feeling of a foreign drusje robe hung on her shoulders. She had been given it after her father had begun to burn and his screams of agony mixed with her ones of sorrow and terror. A man had knelt beside her then, dressed in a blue robe just like the man that had burned her father. When it was over, he pulled her to her feet slowly and draped the robe over her shoulder.
The weight of it was enough to remind her of Matthias' disgust again. The only comfort she had was that when the demons began pulling her away, he had looked scared. Not of her, but for her. He had shouted her name one last time. And that was the last time she saw him before she pulled away completely and swarmed with the blue-robed demons.
A hand was suddenly placed upon her shoulder and Freya had to fight to not scream or jerk away again. They were all dangerous to her, even if they had acted kindly towards her in the past hour – two? Three? – they had been walking through the woods. Freya looked up at the person – the same Zemini woman as before – and noticed that the soldiers around her were speaking to each other. They had all stopped walking and had taken off their packs.
They were stopping for the night then. Freya had to wonder if it was even going to be night for much longer, with how long they had been walking. With nothing else to focus on suddenly, the ache of the burn on her neck and her frozen bare feet barreled into her. She went willingly when the Zemini woman pulled her gently over to a tree. At its roots, someone had prepared furs and blankets for her to sleep in. She sat down thankfully and quickly pulled the blue robe off of her shoulders. She hated the weight of it, the charred smell of it, the feel of its material. The Zemini woman did not question it, merely took the robe into her hand with a smile and left.
Freya quickly cocooned herself in the furs and blankets. The burn mark on her skin was still searing as if the fire was just then reaching her and marring her skin. The mark already felt taut and it was difficult to move her neck. Freya tried to do it more and flinched at how much the skin pulled. A frown pulled her lips down. It would be ugly, she knew. Red or black or glazed and entirely not beautiful. A disgusting point of damage on her skin that would forever remind her of the night her village and her father burned.
She felt like crying again, but this time she fought the tears off. It was a wonder when sleep came and lulled her into its arms.
✧･ﾟ: *✧･ﾟ:* *:･ﾟ✧*:･ﾟ✧
When morning came, Freya wanted to curse herself for putting herself in such a vulnerable position. She was amidst enemies and she had fallen asleep. If they had decided to kill her – truly she had to wonder why they hadn't done so yet – she wouldn't have been able to stop them. She doubted she would be able to do so now when she was awake either. She was a girl of seven, never taught to fight because she was too young to even wrap her hand around a dagger properly. Her broken arm was an even bigger obstacle.
No one spoke to her, but they certainly spoke of her and do not even attempt to hide their stares and how they pointed at her. Freya could only sit and stare as they ate from tin bowls. As she waited – she didn't even know what she was waiting for – she rolled her wrists in the cuffs. It was a wonder she had fallen asleep at all with the wooden pole holding her hands far apart and the metal of the cuffs digging into her skin uncomfortably.
Eventually, the same Zemini woman came to her, a man following behind her. He was dressed in a robe of red with black embroidery. Freya dug through her mind, but she could not remember the meaning of the colours. The blue-robed demons had summoned fire and had burned down her village with it. That was all she knew. Their robes had red thread woven through them, while the Zemini woman had white decorating the blue. She did not know what the white meant, just as she did not know what the black and red the man was wearing meant.
He was tall and broadly built, his size intimidating as he stood over her with crossed arms. It was the first time that morning that it had occurred to her that she should be afraid. Why she had not been before, she did not know, but she was sure that she had paled in face of the man and leaned away until her back was pressed into the tree trunk behind her and the bark dug into her skin through her thin nightgown.
The man's hard gaze softened just a bit, but then that gentleness was gone and he appeared rather cruel again. He seemed sort of familiar with his warrior-like build, strong jaw, blue eyes and pale blond hair. With a start, Freya realised he reminded her of her father. It was then she noticed that the man must've been Fjerdan just like her. He had the typical traits of a man born in her country.
"Kei ryezich Ravkayash?" the man asked. Freya blinked up at him. She understood the last word: Ravkan. Otherwise, she was lost. When she stayed silent, the man nodded and knelt in the snow in front of her. The next words he spoke were in her mother tongue. "I asked if you speak Ravkan, but it is clear you don't." He tilted his head and reached forward to grasp the pole that held her hands apart. He pulled it towards him and Freya hissed as pain shot through her injured arm. "I am going to take this off and heal your arm. If you try to do whatever you did back there, it will be the last thing you do."
"I don't even know how I did it." Freya cursed herself the second the words left her lips. She just admitted she had no way to defend herself. She supposed it did not matter, there were at least twenty of them around her and it had taken but one man to wrangle her the last time.
"You did it because you are Grisha," the man said as a matter of fact. Freya's lips curled into a disgusted snarl. Her father had dedicated his life to hunting drusje before he eventually settled down with her mother. Many of the village men aspired to be like him, a member of the elite force and the closest followers of Djel their country would ever see. For her to be one of them, one of the... Grisha. It made her sick.
"I am not a drusje," she spat at the man, then quickly wondered if she had overstepped. But the man did not lash out, did not hit her or burn her or stop her heart as she had learned some of the drusje could do from her father. He only quirked the corner of his mouth up into a smirk, then turned her arm so her palm was facing up. He did not do it roughly or quickly, but Freya still winced.
"You burst Oleg's eardrums. It took hours last night for me to repair everything, and I still don't know if I did it right." He pushed her sleeve up and frowned at the bruised and swollen skin that coated her arm. He looked up at her one last time with a warning, and then he unlocked the cuffs and they fell from her wrists. Then his fingers grazed her skin and a tingling feeling ran through the limb. Freya wanted to jerk her arm away at the strange sensation, but the man held it tightly in place. "Tell me if anything I do hurts too much, I am not a healer."
Freya watched with wonder as the swelling in her arm slowly went down – the skin turning back to the pale ivory it once was. "If you are not a healer how are you doing that?" she asked, unsure of every word she spoke. She did not know these people. Only knew that they killed Fjerdans at the border, at the bordering villages. Killed her father. The knowledge had escaped her for a few minutes and she had gotten far too comfortable in their presence. Just because they stayed away from her, looked at her with worry the night before when tears flooded down her face and her sobs reverberated throughout the trees. Just because they spoke her tongue and healed her arm.
"You do not have to be afraid," the man told her suddenly. She had not moved an inch. How did he know she was afraid? Did he just assume? She supposed any child would be afraid when surrounded by enemy soldiers. "I can sense your heartbeat," the man explained when he noticed her confused expression. "It picked up all of a sudden. And to answer your previous question, I can do this because I am a Corporalki. I am not a healer, I am a Heartrender, but I can still do the basics." Freya mouthed the words, tasting them on her tongue. Corporalki, Heartrender. Her father would have just called them monsters.
"This is the basics?" she asked, noticing the pain in her arm slowly ceasing as the man set her bones in her arm. She swore she felt them fuse back together. The man breathed out a smothered laugh.
"Yes, this is the basics. Corporalki healers can perform miracles." She stared down at her arm as the man let go of her arm. This was the basics. He had taken a broken bone, left to sit ruined overnight. Her arm had been so purple and red and swollen that it did not even look like her arm anymore. In any other circumstances, the arm would have only gotten worse and eventually, the rot would set in. Her mother was the village healer, and she would have told Freya it would need to be amputated. But that did not happen and her arm looked as though it had not been crushed breath the weight of a fleeing frantic woman.
If this was what every drusje of the Corporalki could do, what did the miracles the man referred to look like? Men brought back from the edge of death? When their life hung so precariously off of the cliff that only a slight wind would send them over the edge? Bullet wounds, severed limbs, cut arteries. Burned flesh.
The man was getting up, getting ready to walk away. Surprising herself, Freya's hand shot forward and she curled her fingers into the red fabric of his robe. The man stopped and looked down at her again.
"Could your healers bring back a man who died in flames?" she asked, though deep down she already knew the answer. The man's cold face showed no emotion, but she could have sworn there was a drop of sympathy in the pit of his blue eyes.
"I do not think it works that way, child."