Feathers and Blades (4)
He wakes up with a start.
An instinct that’s saved his life before, an instinct that has him on his feet before he even knows what it was he sensed.
Hesitant, stealthy movements, someone not wanting to be heard.
Fully awake then, he knows there’s no danger to him… any danger was to someone else.
It’s her. Fumbling at the cord securing the flap of the tent.
He pulls her inside. Her eyes open wide but vacant, pupils dilated, she follows, a pliable puppet.
He eases her into a kneeling position, she sinks and leans her weight against him, right shoulder resting against him, left arm stiff, angled away awkwardly.
He turns up the oil-lamp and that’s when he sees blood all along the left of her body. It has run in dark red rivers along her arm, stained smeared and spattered across her flank, hips, thighs.
Naked and bleeding. Alone in the night. So incredibly vulnerable.
There is surely in this age of the world, he thinks, no woman who has more people willing to follow her, fight and die for her – but just as well – none with more foes lusting for her blood, none with more assassins seeking to stalk and stab. None more than you, Tsilsne.
And then you wander out like this.
Not for the first time he thinks, what in the world am I going to do with you.
He’s seen lots of wounds and lots of blood, so he knows it’s not a life-threatening injury.
He finds the wounds spread from her wrist up halfway to her elbow.
Scratches, coarse ragged cuts and deeper punctures; they seem clean though. Mostly they have staunched, there is only a little blood welling up.
It is a strange map drawn on her wrist and arm.
An undecipherable inscription.
An incantation, a spell scratched into the magic scroll of her tender skin.
As he props her up with some of the cushions scattered about, and begins dressing and bandaging the injuries, the faithful maid, alone now, sleeps on, blissfully unaware.
He knows, if she’d wanted to kill herself she would have cut differently.
In fact, it was not a blade at all that did this.
Certainly not that fiendish dagger she’d got from the Krogan-Zubal’s man.
In his heart a brief but violent stab of jealousy, a white hot jet, at the thought of that man. The barely tolerable mixture of his competence and impudence, daring to brazenly offer such a thing as a gift, that man knowing her on sight so well, it seemed, as to guess how she'd cherish what would make any other woman recoil aghast; knowing of the other gifts exchanged between them, just ... knowing of him knowing her.
That edge, sharp enough to cut a floating feather, it would have sunk to the bone if she’d so much as drawn it across.
This secret though, he knows, is between me and you; the bought Zubali captain has never seen Tsilsne like this.
He's seen many wounds, taken many himself too – if he had to guess, he’d say she had repeatedly hacked at her wrist with a large, sharp nail.
Whatever she did, it has to stop.
This has to stop.
It’s not the first time she has gone out on one of these absences.
Not the first time she’s gone out stark naked.
And not the first time she’s injured herself either.
Still she takes no precaution against her somnambulic episodes and brushes off any mention of them.
How ridiculously easy would it be for an enemy infiltrator to take her!
Over the last year he has replaced all of the guards of the inner circle with men bound in loyalty firstmost to his own person. Though he made those preparations for other reasons, he has hinted to them of such occurrences, and given them firm instruction, for her own safety, to apprehend and deliver her to him whenever she should be found wandering unaccompanied and seemingly not of sound mind.
It is nothing that should ever be known of the Regent Queen of Belquemer in wider circles.
Some have taken to calling her ‘The Mad Queen’, but that is said more with a quaver of fear in the voice, for the sake of the peerlessly gruesome retributions she has been known to take.
It would change to derision if they knew of this.
'Just once. Just this one time.. and then... never again.'
He’s startled to hear her voice, her answer coming so late, with him realizing only now he’d said it aloud to himself…
'This has to stop'.
There’s no tension at all in her muscles although her skin is feverishly hot to touch, her head is lolling as he tries to keep her somewhat upright, her mouth half-open with a thread of drool down her chin, the only sign of sentience being her eyes that try to focus on and follow him, but again and again lose their track and roll back into her head. In fact he didn’t see her mouth move with those words.
... and then... never again.
So, its not over, it’s not finished, whatever you’ve been doing?
Let me tell you, it will never be finished, he thinks.
Because I know what you’ve been doing, he thinks.
Because a man like him, all through the days of being a boy fighting desperate in dusty streets, to a soldier in hobnailed boots, a General of the Gabardine Empire, a mercenary, a captive, hostage, advisor and General again...
... he’s seen a lot of wounds, and taken many too.
Those on the outside and those on the inside.
And a few of them, he may have hacked into himself, just like she does.
You’ve been out wrestling with demons, he thinks.
And you can only do that alone.
That much, I understand.
and, believe it or not, his love for the Mary Poppins soundtrack has recently been superseded by Led Zeppelin. I think his father has been meddling there 
