He felt something in his chest. Something warm and comforting, then came the sounds of the camp. Hrafn opened his eyes slowly and found the source of that comfort, a man not much older than him kneeling at his side, both hands spread over his chest. A dull white glow leaked from his fingers and poured through Hrafn's flesh in mild waves, running inside his ribs.
When he noticed Hrafn had awakened the man drew his hands back and nodded. Hrafn merely nodded back, he preferred it that way. The man stayed there, leaning slightly backward looking at him with an expression that looked like pity. Hrafn did not pay much attention, they said the white-blessed generally had soft hearts. It made sense, you had to have one to choose to feel the pain of others when there was already enough pain in the world for any honest man.
He raised his left hand and ran his fingers through his hair pushing it back. Then he took his right to his waist seeking the comfort of the sword's cold hilt, but it was not there. Not the sword, not the hand, not any arm at all. Pain rose in the back of his neck and went down his spine like heated metal, spreading into the emptiness where the limb should have been. The scream tore out of his throat before he could hold it back. The memory came back all at once, the first fallen dropping beneath the hersir, the firm line of the voroirs, the closed forest, the smell of blood, the rupture.
And the price.
Yes, he had had to choose between being impaled through the chest or being impaled through the shoulder. But with voroirs nearby, he had thought he might still keep the limb. That some white-blessed healer would stitch it back to flesh, that the Hird would pull some miracle out of the Veil's ribs and return him whole, if he had enough luck.
But since when have I ever had that much damned luck?
"Do not try to move the missing arm, brother," the voroir beside him said. His voice had a polished pity Hrafn already hated before hearing all of it. "Your mind does not yet understand the loss and whenever you try to move it. You will feel agony."
His megin poured relief over the wounded flesh, dulling a little of the fire racing through the nerves. "But with training and with time, you will be able to grow used to it."
Ah, good. Very simple, isn't it idiot. You only need to get used to it.
"I'll keep it in mind," Hrafn answered, after a few moments. The voroir nodded, satisfied.
That sort of kindness had always seemed more a consolation for the one offering it than for the one receiving it, even so, he bit back the irritation. The man was a voroir and given what he was, perhaps one day he might end up even more miserable than Hrafn himself. He lay back down and drew a deep breath; the air smelled of earth, soaked cloth and blood, a great deal of blood.
The voroir's megin eased the pain but did not erase it. Every impulse of his mind toward the absent arm brought new agony, as though the body refused to accept the loss. He tried to think of something else, looking on the bright side had always been one of his best skills or at least pretending to. A few things soon came to mind; he would no longer have to look at the damned face of the dock employer, now he was a nobleman, a one-armed nobleman, true, but a nobleman all the same, and there were also his new capacities.
That almost pulled a smile from him, because even smiling hurt. "Do not feel so bad," the young voroir said, apparently understanding something wrongly. "There is much a voroir can still achieve with only one limb. Color inclines the megin, but does not define everything. I have seen brothers fight with one hand, with one eye, with broken ribs. I have seen—"
Hrafn let the voice drain into the bottom of the world. Did he feel like a ruin? Without question, Resigned? Not even close.
The more he thought about his own condition, and the more some crooked remnant of a smile escaped him, the more hurried the voroir's voice became. The man started listing everything one could still do without an arm. Hrafn let him talk to himself and sank again into the memories of the battle. A memory of having felt so much still disturbed him, but it fascinated him too.
As far as he knew, the green-blessed were almost like the white-blessed in their strange nature. The difference was that the white touched flesh and pain, while the green seemed to sink their fingers into older things. Every voroir was already stronger than a common man, but some were less shaped for war than others. In that world that was almost a sin, even so what had passed through him that night had not seemed like weakness. Quite the opposite, he remembered the state he had been in, the smell of blood, it no longer seemed he had sensed it only through his nostrils. It had not even felt like a smell, it was as though blood itself had run over him.
As though everything had its own weight, heat and direction. As though all the blood in the world knew exactly where it wanted to run, and for an instant, he had known too. The feeling came again with the thought. Even still inside the tent he realized the camp was awake around him. Makeshift dark-canvas awnings shivered in the wind, some wounded men moaned low, others no longer moaned at all. The wind was not merely blowing against his skin, it came from many sides, from many places in too many forms. There was the high breath in the treetops, the creeping between the tents, the small motion close to the ground slipping among buried roots and cold stones, that brought him a memory from one of Saga's stories.
The Green Ruin… their bodies became part of the soil.
The phrase rose cleanly in his head, and with it came a sensation of closeness, as though he finally understood, if only by a finger's breadth, what had been wrong and sacred in that old story. He looked beyond the white healer and felt a few paces away, a strip of churned earth where dark blood had been absorbed. There was a silent voracity there he would not have known how to name, and the most disturbing part was that it did not seem monstrous to him.
Only old and natural. As though the forest, the earth, and the blood maintained among themselves a conversation too ancient for men to call cruel. A shiver ran down the back of his neck almost as if, for a moment, he too were part of it. The feeling went away as quickly as it had come, but it left a trace.
"Are you feeling something?" the white voroir asked, perhaps finally noticing that Hrafn had not been listening for quite some time.
It took Hrafn a moment to answer. "Hunger," he lied.
The other let out a small laugh, perhaps relieved to hear something ordinary. "That is good. It means the body wants to continue."
Hrafn did not answer, he looked through the opening of the tent, toward the dark line of the trees where the forest began. Under the light the trunks looked like ancient columns in a roofless hall, and perhaps that was exactly what they were. Perhaps his sense of time had come near theirs for a brief instant. Not the time of men, counted in breaths, fears and small urgencies, but the time of what remains still while everything around it is born, rots, and sinks. The thought should have frightened him more, instead, it brought a crooked kind of comfort.
He had lost an arm, but he had awakened to something else, strange and old, perhaps horrible, perhaps useful, maybe both.
He moved his shoulder lightly by reflex and the phantom pain returned, savage, tearing the air out of him. He shut his eyes and waited for the wave to pass, jaw clenched so hard he thought he might crack a tooth. When the agony receded, what remained was only the exhaustion and that new perception, deep lurking beneath the skin.
An arm was still a high price, but it was beginning to seem less absurd.