a dead language

We were ambushed at the cemetery. Noel, shot blank through the shoulder, the thigh; too many shots to count. He hit the earth with the lifted brows of disbelief. Like a fool, I scooped him up by his underarms, dragging his heavy frame past crumbling tombstones; blood seeped from his body like oil. The man who attacked us, and his lanky friend, lay dead leaps away from us now, eyes like glass in the moonlight. The thin one managed to graze my side with a bullet, but I ignored the sharp sting pulsing below my flesh like a second heartbeat. 

With a grunt I pushed through an open mausoleum, pulling Noel’s body inside with whatever energy I had left. His head was bobbing, but I knew he wasn’t yet dead. 

I propped him against the large stone tomb at the center of the room. Dead leaves and dust littered the floor; I wondered if grave robbers had found themselves here before. Only the rich could afford such a stately entombment. 

Carefully I peered out from the mausoleum, surveyed the surroundings, and closed the door, metal scraping against stone. I let my hands remain pressed against the cool metal for a long minute, breathing deep, eyes focusing. I could hear shouting from far away. The bodies had been spotted. 

A cough sounded from behind me and I whipped around to face my companion. “You’re stronger than you look,” he wheezed. I watched as he touched the wound at his shoulder, wincing. Blood now stained the tips of his fingers. 

I walked over to him and sat down beside him, clutching my side. “It looks like you’ll need to find new informants,” I said, trying to sound jovial. I knew there was nothing I could do for him. 

There was just a small window to the night in this stone box. Silver moonlight broke through it’s metal bars, casting light and shadow across Noel’s face. 

He was much older than me. I could see the subtle beginnings of wrinkling at the corners of his eyes. Laugh lines, I had heard them called before. I wondered how he ended up here; why he chose the shadows when his eyes seemed so bright. 

He laughed, “Now why would you say that?” 

I smiled, leaning my head against the solid tomb behind me and looking up at the ceiling. 

It was supposed to be a normal job. Noel needed another someone dead, for political reasons I didn’t dine to inquire about, and I was to crawl in like a plague to rid another piece from his chessboard. One touch from my bare hands was all it would take. The deadliest checkmate, and the heartiest reward. Did these people deserve death? I couldn’t be certain. 

Did I deserve to live?

But today Noel was played for a fool; a pawn in his own game. The Duke was feeding the same pockets, it seemed, and for a much larger sum. 

There was a silence and we both looked toward the moon; the air growing stagnant. 

“It’s too bad your magic doesn’t go both ways,” he said quietly, closing his eyes. 

He didn’t know how much and for how long I had wished the same. 

A small bit of fear bubbled in my throat, watching his body sink down. Time seeped out of him in blood. And I couldn’t put it back. 

Suffering; it was all I could ever bring to this world. And a quick death. 

If only Sara were here. I could picture it, almost. Could see the spindles of golden light threading together a broken body; coaxing the soul to retreat. 

My fingers itched to try, an old and weathered hope that perhaps, by some grace of the gods, that I could share life too. 

“I’m sorry,” I whispered, willing my eyes to remain dry. 

He turned to me, a sad smile playing on his lips. “I got what was coming to me. There’s no need to blame yourself.” 

I merely bowed my head, strands of hair loosening from their pins. I knew I’d blame myself until the end of time. Losing the man who saw potential in a broken witch, however grim that potential had been… I couldn’t stomach the thought. 

Silence filled the space around us. The pain at my side grew more persistent, and I could feel a cold sweat build up on my forehead, exhaustion pulling at my eyelids. Noel rested beside me. I watched his lungs rise and fall; shaky, but alive still. It was an odd comfort, to watch someone breathe. 

After a time, I too closed my eyes, given way to pain-riddled memories disguised as dreams. 

I could hear her laugh, strawberry locks glistening in the sunlight that broke through wooden towers and leaves. The flowers’ faces always looked up to greet her. Petals curled outward in a wave. The wind circled her soul; a constant companion and guide as she searched for earthen remedies, plucked them from the earth with small hands, rosy knuckles. Even with dirt between her toes, mud up to her knees, my sister was a sight to behold. Pure sunshine, pure life. 

Sara was a healer. A golden witch in the woods, she was—just like our mother, and her mother before her, and back and back. I’d heard the lineage enough times to grow sick of it. And I watched my mother spindle enough life together with thin whispers of white-gold threads of magic, knowing well that that same warmth did not flow through the veins of my hands. I was not a daughter, just a black spot on an otherwise golden lineage. 

I trailed behind Sara and the earth seemed to shudder wherever I stepped. Grass grayed, flowers cowering low, petals closed to my grave eyes. The wind would not dance for me. 

“Luce!” Sara called from a few strides down the trail. 

I picked up my pace and found her kneeling near the base of a tree, parting the taller grass to find a weeping rabbit. It was a small, white creature with red eyes. His pink nose wriggled open and closed in quick breaths, but the body was unmoving. It’s back leg was malformed, wet with blood. 

“It’s hurt,” Sara said, gently touching its back leg. The creature whimpered and my sistered cooed at it, as if it were a crying babe. 

I could almost smell its fate. A sharp, pungent twinge of musk in the air, like the scent before a storm. “We should leave it,” I told her; the rabbit’s eyes bore into my own, as if in agreement. 

Sara looked up to me. A scowl was spread awkwardly across her soft features; it was almost funny, how hard it was for her to look displeased. “You and I both know we can heal him,” she said, the hint of a tsk to her voice. Just like mother. She turned back to the rabbit, pressed light fingers around the wound, as if she could see an answer beneath skin and fur. 

I ignored the royal we of her words. Countless times had I been in this forest as we were now, searching for wounded animals, weeping flowers. For hours I would hold out my hands, willing threads of life, of magic, to spool from my fingertips, stitching together whatever was torn or broken before me. 

Remembered kneeling in the muddied earth of a storm, screaming up at the black clouds. Thunder wracked through the sky like laughter. I cursed every god I knew. 

Still, my veins ran cold like a current of chilled water in a warm sea. 

While my sister saved life, I merely severed it—as easily as plucking a single strand of hair from one’s scalp. 

It was a choice, not cowardice, in my decision to sever myself from the family business. If anything, my choice was a desire to make coins from rotten lemons. The business of death—especially in a bustling city full of vengeful, ambitious aristocrats—was grand for the purse. Noel showed me that world, in all its worn vanity. 

A jump of white caught my eye. The rabbit, healed and hopping, bolted through the grass. My sister stood, waving to the creature that was but a white fleck among a sea of green, swaying plants. 

Still, the prickling stench of death clung about the air.   

And then, a flash of gray cut through the woods. A wolf, claiming its prey. 

I knew we should have left it.

A cough stirred me from my musings and I opened my eyes. Noel’s pallor had worsened; nearly as grey as the stone around us. His leg was surrounded by a pool of red. 

“You know, I’ve been thinking,” he said, voice nothing but a scratch. “You’re rather severe for your age.” 

I almost laughed. “What?”

“I was watching you sleep,” he said, raising his right arm, his finger pointing lazily at my face. Or some part of her face—his hand wasn’t steady. “You scowl when you dream.” 

“Then it wasn’t a dream,” I mused, removing my hand from the wound at my side, surveying the damage in what little light we had. Not terrible, I could survive it. But the pain was dreadful. I knew we needed to leave, find another place to hide. But I didn’t want to move. The shouts had stopped at some point in time… And I fathomed whether we were in the clear. Whether it was just those two men; that it was all there ever had been. Or whether the duke’s crones surrounded us now, silent ghosts, either waiting for us to die, or for one of us to venture out. 

“You shouldn’t hate your magic,” he said. I half wondered whether he was losing his mind now. That it was slipping out of him with all the rest. 

“It’s a curse, Noel,” I responded. “That’s why you hired me.”

“I hired you because you were cheap,” he said, a dulled glint in his eye. “And I’m a frugal bastard when it comes down to it.”

“You still haven’t paid me for the bishop.” 

He ignored that. “If I die, which seems rather likely, you can take all my things,” he said. “Hell, take my flat. You’re always complaining about your family.” 

“I don’t want your flat. It stinks of fish.”

“But it has a fine view of the port.”

“Hence the smell,” I said, shaking my head. 

Was this how people talked, when they sensed an end? A mix of sadness, words clinging to a sense of normalcy. 

“Fine, fine,” he said, shifting his position. It was a pathetic attempt. “If you won’t take my flat, then I want you to do something else.” 

I was never one for promises. I could smell it forming in the air, dread a pit in my stomach. 

“We both know I’m not going to make it. If I don’t die here, I’ll die out there,” he said, his voice a steadying wind. “And I won’t be having you drag me about the cemetery like some rag doll.” 

“I’m not leaving you here, if that’s what you’re asking me.”

“No, no. Not precisely.” 

“Then what?”

He waited. His eyes studied my face. 

“I want you to try healing me.”

I blinked, fighting a feeling of offense. “Are you daft? I’ve told you what happens.” 

“The way I see it, I’ll die either way.” He paused. “At least this way I get a choice.”

I bit my lip, fingers digging into the fabric of my pants. “I won’t do it.”

“I’m telling you there’s no harm in it, kid.” 

“But if I kill you…” 

“Then you’ll end this insufferable ache in my leg.” 

He saw my hesitation and took my hands in his own. They were so cold, and it made my heart crumble. I could feel the plea in his touch. “Okay.”

I took my hands from his own and placed them on his leg, the worst of his injuries. The blood was still warm, slick to the touch. 

I closed my eyes, inhaled, tried to imagine all the times I watched my mother and sister work their magic, like pulling threads from the universe. I exhaled. 

But there was a wall in my mind, unbreachable. It told me not to pass, not to try. I had built this wall up eons ago. Knew it’s craftsmanship, just as I knew what my hands were capable of; there was no light in me. I had searched my soul countless times, only to find an expansive, abyssal blackness. I could never find that same healing light. Not like Sara’s. Not like my mother’s. I couldn’t allow Noel to be swallowed by my current too. It felt wrong. The only person that didn’t see me as wrong. That gave me purpose. Just a young girl on the docks, staring at her hands as if they were weapons. 

Those same hands were shaking now. 

My power has always been a severance, a withdrawal. 

I thought of the rabbit. Wondered if Noel, too, would be better off left to die. To save him the pain of another faithless end waiting around the corner. 

I could imagine it now. The cold current running beneath my skin. The sound of Noel’s soul leaving his mouth in a single, long breath. 

Not again. 

I wanted a different outcome. If the gods could play with fate, why couldn’t I? What did I have to lose? 

So, rather than beg, I commanded. Dared the universe to bend to my desire. 

I called, and called, and called. 

I felt the walls in my mind crack and crumble. It was a slow, strained process. 

Until a light began to break through, just a sliver. And I willed it to grow. 

New magic stuck to me like a morning dew, an unfamiliar warmth spreading down my arms. 

The mausoleum became enveloped in a golden light; it faded just as quickly.

Together, Noel and I looked to his leg, my hands slowly moving away. 

Though the wound hadn’t healed entirely, there was an improvement. A scab had formed, and no more blood was lost. Even his shoulder, which I hadn’t even touched, had found itself mended. 

But my own wound had gotten worse, more painful. I kept quiet about it, trying not to wince so visibly; no matter how deep the hurt seemed to travel. Perhaps I had given more than what was necessary. I watched him closely as he moved his leg this way and that, rotated his shoulder. The wrinkles on his eyes had all but disappeared. 

I speculated that despite this first success, I still wasn’t quite good at healing. I seemed to have pulled life from myself, rather than the air around me. I scolded myself for not paying more heed to my mother’s warnings—thinking that, at a time, they had not applied to me. Not really. 

It was slow, but a dizziness came over me. Reality began to slip, Noel’s words growing muffled, indistinct from the sound of my heartbeat in my ears. His frame blurred as he moved about the mausoleum as a restored man. Minutes could’ve past, maybe hours, but my mind merely waded down a broken stream. 

The last thing I remembered was being scooped up by strong arms, my head resting against something warm, comforting; mumbling to my friend not to leave the mausoleum. To be wary of wolves.