Chapter 8
1.
Mornings carry an air of crispness that gently strokes one’s wounded body and soul to alertness, regardless of where one is. It was more effective in Verna’s case, as the chilly dew and earthy scents of the forest made her aware of being carried by calloused hands. Her head, however, was ungrateful and pounded out an unsuccessful rebellion. Several parts of her body ached and burned, as if she had been repeatedly slapped before her skin tore open. Which was probably true, she decided, as the magical clash with Lady Strovinkaya’s forces came back to her in vivid images.
“I’ll walk,” she tried to say, but it came out something like, “Oi Waao.”
One of the hands near her head jerked, possibly in surprise, and her head was on its way to the ground before someone else caught it like a falling coconut. A brief telling-off ensued, and Verna tried not to retch. Instead, after catching her breath, she focused on her surroundings.
It was fresh, the air slightly chilly, and there were many vocal insects, while the birds and the animals sounded strangely muted. She could hear the dragging footsteps of tired people, the voices of patient mothers trying to distract their offsprings, and the strained breathing of people carrying her.
“Let’s rest a bit, and I will try to walk with you,” said Verna, thankfully more coherent this time.
“You will probably slow us down even more, Princess,” said one of the people carrying her.
“Yes, but at least, you would have your full strengths for walking, rather than labouring to carry one who could slowly treat herself. And, the exercise will do me good,” said Verna.
After some doubtful murmuring, she was gently lowered onto the forest floor, with strange needles and twigs as a bed of comfort to her. She propped herself up on an elbow, the one less sore, and looked at the curious faces surrounding her. There must have been at least two-hundred women and children there, the impromptu column stretching quite a distance between the trees and shrubs.
The villagers all sagged down, even the children following the examples of adults. The group of women carrying Verna promptly fell over into soundless, dreamless sleep.
Silently, some of the more aged women began to circulate food — dried hare strips and berries from the forest. Some of the older children began to weave large leaves together into bowls. Verna watched the proceedings with fascination, wary of the cautious glances thrown her way.
Eventually, a boy around ten handed her an extremely thick leaf-bowl with mashed berries and leaves. “Mama said to tell you that you should eat this, even if you are awake and talking,” he said without meeting her eyes, before scampering away to hide behind a tree and still watch her.
Verna smiled and told him to convey her thanks. “What’s your name?” she asked.
“Nem,” said the boy. “What’s yours?”
“Verna. Given I am the newcomer here, I am surprised you didn’t know it already.”
“You are the princess,” said Nem, before running off as fast as his malnourished form would’ve allowed. Verna sighed, feeling a twinge of sadness for the boy. She could sense a growing world-weariness in him that many people in the capital wouldn’t have even in their deathbeds. Upon looking around, she realized all the children looked like they were bracing themselves for apocalypse.
“Princess,” said a strong, weather-worn voice above her, and Verna started back to reality. “Heard you were awake. How do you do?”
She was puzzled at first, but her memory slowly conjured up the woman who fought with her against Lady Strovinkaya’s forces. “Jhorka?” Verna asked?
“Yes, that’s me, Princess,” said the woman, a touch impatiently.
“I am fine, thank you. Far better than some of you here, I suspect. Thank you for not abandoning me to the river.”
After a beat, Jhorka said guardedly, “I would not lie and say it was our pleasure. But I also would not regret it till you give me cause. We all are waiting to see what happens here on out.”
Strangely, Verna understood this woman with rough hands and wrinkled skin. She, the human, and the aristocracy at that, had stood with them and fought with them, and was even now travelling with them, hidden, through the woods. But she also knew that this would be the best way to spy on them and use it against them. Besides, there was a target on her back these simple people could not afford. And regardless, they had brought her along, refusing to let the water take her.
“Jhorka, if you could trust me, could you tell me more about merhuman magic?”
“What do you want to know, Princess?” said Jhorka. By this time, a few young women had crept closer to listen in. Verna smiled at them but got only guarded nods in return.
“Whatever you can tell me.” She turned to everyone. “What are you all capable of?”
No one answered. No one even looked at her now, but were trading determined glances with each other.
“It has been stripped from us a long time ago,” said one old woman from the huddle. “We no longer have it, and so we have learned to live without needing it.”
“But, Mistress, it was from you people that we learned our own magic, or at least that we can enhance the natural state of objects and make them act,” Verna protested. The woman just shook her head and went back to her meagre food.
Jhorka sighed. “Princess, our magic is tied up with water. We can manipulate not just water bodies, but also the water content in the air.”
“What can you do with it? What I saw you do was so remarkable, far out of bounds of what a normal human mage’s power would let them do.”
“Princess,” Jhorka interrupted, “I am the only one in this group, and for a few villages around, who could do some merhuman magic. Not everyone can do it anymore. I mostly pull out congealed water from places so that things can function. What I did with you that day was indeed huge. It would have killed me if you were not shoring up my defenses.”
With that, Jhorka walked away, and that seemed to be an end to that.
The next few days were a lesson in the practical suffering of the Empire’s most downtrodden for Verna. The nights were extremely cold, and even the thick branches and leaves over groups of sleepers did not warm them fully. Many developed persistent shivers despite the mugginess of the short daylight hours. The group kept circling the forest in a tightly packed area, their attempts at not making noise making more noise than anything else. Alarmingly, the tender scales of children below ten started to fall off, probably due to the unhygienic conditions resulting in infection.
Food was scarce. While fruits, water, and edible leaves were there, animals were rarer. Even Verna’s spells failed to locate warm-blooded life nearby, one of her amateurish attempts at scrying giving her a ringing headache instead. Fires at night were impossible for the smoke they would send up over the treeline. She quickly realized that warming two-hundred people and keeping them clean was a magically impossible task, even with her magic and Jhorka’s assistance. That only worsened the infections that spread to the children and old people, and without proper study, she was unable to grind up the necessary medicine. For example, while two bitterfruit seeds with water from a streambed would cure fever, three would induce the body to expel toxins through sweat, and if there were no toxins, it would only dehydrate the patient further.
The other problem, and it bothered Verna to quite an extent, was that the longer they spent in the woods, the more hostile a group of merhumans became toward her. While she understood it to be partly caused by her relentless curiosity and cluelessness about the practicalities of living without magic, it still made her feel lonely. At times, she felt Jhorka should understand how she felt, or at least pretend to do so, but her colder and more rational mind reminded that she was the outlier here, not them.
In the meantime, she had taken to learning from the children basic flora and fauna of the region, as well as teaching them back the various uses. Some of them, like Nem, were exceptionally adept at medicinal purposes, while others, like a little girl named Pera, was more fond of simply having a name to call things by. Verna was pleased because the children were learning so fast under so much strain, but also sad because she knew these lessons would be lost to the same strain.
Their learning sessions often included games where she would manipulate the elements to shape as models of plants and animals, sometimes using them to tell a story, at other times instructing them in science. The extremely old sometimes joined these sessions, hijacking the classes with surprising tangents, but also drawing in more and more children. The younger women also sidled closer on more than one occasion, eavesdropping with open curiosity.
The grim environment, however, continued. Within a few days of Verna’s waking up, the damp daylight turned into murky rain, then turned into hailstones at night. With no caves to hide in, the group hid under big trees and rocky ledges. It was no good against the hailstones. Many got hit, none could sleep, and it worsened all tempers. Mothers screamed at children for minor discomforts, which led to the children sticking closer to their grandmothers. It was especially heartbreaking to see them assisting the elderly without being told or taught to do so, with so much wisdom in their movements that they might as well have been ancient dwarves from her stories.
Verna helped as much as it was possible, but after the hailstorm panic, when help was most needed with the wounds, she was kept at an arm’s length. Children begged to play with her, but mothers, and even grandmothers, often denied this. If Verna offered to treat wounds, or grind up a pain-freezing concoction, a glare was all the answer she often got before her intended audience just walked away in another direction.
One morning a few days later, Verna woke to utter stillness, and upon opening her eyes, she saw several of the middle-aged women with stones in their hands. “What?” she asked, trying to sound confident over the grogginess and sheer pain inside her body.
“Don’t speak, demon,” said one of the women.
“But —” the stone descended rather too fast for Verna’s liking. She became quiet, wondering how best to convince them. In the meantime, the group took a step back, cocked their hands, and aimed the stones at her, looking defensive. It was with the most ingrained of reflexes that Verna managed to draw around herself a shield of spinning wind, snatching thrown stones and creating a tornado of irregularly spinning stones.
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By the time the villagers ran out of stones both from their pockets and from the ground, their rage had reached a new high. Fortunately for Verna, the resultant scream drew Jhorka to her location, who, with an impressive glare and a sudden gesture of her hands, seemed to deflate the attackers surrounding Verna by recreating a shield of water around her. “Now, what exactly is the meaning of this?”
“What is the meaning? Jhorka, you know very well what the menaing is! Nem is almost dying, his grandmother died last night alone in her corner, and Nem’s mother —” yelled the woman who seemed to be the group’s leader.
“Well,” cut in Jhorka as Verna felt shock spread through her torso, “Nem’s mother did not ask you to stone the princess to death, did she?”
“Princess? Do you buy that nutshit she has been spewing? She has been eating our food, turning our children against us, all for what? She’s holding back, I’m telling you! First that mage and now this princess leading the village into destruction.”
“What village, Serilya? Like it or not, it’s gone! We are in the forest now, and do you lot have nothing better to do than attacking a young woman?”
“She’s no woman!” Serilya responded angrily. “She had Tusparki eat meat, and then this happened. Who makes an old woman eat meat? My own children are hungry, and Nem doesn’t have a grandmother now!”
Jhorka looked at Verna inquisitively, and she could not raise her head to look them in the eyes.
“I tried my best,” she murmured.
“What, then, would you have liked done, Serilya? Do you know your herbs, or any of the science of medicine? Would Nem have trusted your word over the Princess’?”
“Then why didn’t she save her?” Serilya shouted. “She’s holding back! I’m telling you. If she can teach my daughter to call me stupid, why can’t she save an old woman in the pink of health?”
“She’s watching us!” another offered. “Like insects in a jar.”
“Yes!” Serilya continued. “She doesn’t care about us at all. Her soldiers drove us out. She didn’t stop them, but here she is, eating from the mud like us and rolling around the same mud with us. Why else would she do that?”
“What a load of crap!” Jhorka still did not lose her cool, even as her eyes showed bottled-up anger. “Honestly, with your hands to your hearts, do you really think Verna is such a bad person? To the extent you would attack her during sleep?”
There were murmurs in the undecided negative. The children, wide-eyed with nervousness, stuck in a group, with the older ones trying to comfort the younger ones.
“Has she,” Jhorka indicated Verna, “ever taught violence against anyone, or preached human indoctrination?”
“No,” said the group at large, more decisively.
“Lastly,” said Jhorka, looking hard at the angry women around Verna, “she held off the Empire’s soldiers while all of you escaped with your young. She almost gave her life for us all. What magic she could perform in this state, limping along as she is, she has used it for our people, not for herself, while me or Nem’s mother have been seeing to her foot.”
“But maybe you are bewitched,” said someone from inside the crowd.
“You are the only one who saw this magic against the Empire,” said Serilya. “Let’s say I trust you —”
“Let’s say you’re just angry and frustrated that you and your children are at risk, and you don’t need how to improve your situation except by attacking someone else.”
Serliya looked enraged beyond control, but Jhorka rolled over her protests.
“Or is it that you all are afraid — afraid to trust, afraid to see what lies beyond the village, and afraid to trust that you have any strength? Is it that you have lost all sense of hope, used as you were to Unug’s tyranny, and hopeless now without him or the normal dinner table gossip to sustain you further? Strange of you to mourn the tyrant and despise the one who loves you.”
There was absolute silence. There was a lot of uncertainty and despair. The women around Verna were crying silently. Another woman spoke up.
“Jhorka, we all are scared and things are going too fast, beyond our wildest imaginings. Rain and fever are hardly tokens of love. You said we should go to a town, but it has been weeks and we seem to be lost.”
“What do you suggest, Mia?” asked Jhorka.
“I don’t know,” whispered the woman. “We just want to go back home.”
Jhorka went up to Mia and said, “So do I. But any chance we might have for peace and safety lies with the princess now. At this point, I might just tell everyone what I’m thinking. This — none of this is our fault. This world is changing, and we are insects in a trap. Best case, we fly a few metres away and no one notices.”
“And at worst?” asked one of the weeping women around Verna.
“We go and join the Shark of Suva, mother,” said a boy with spiky hair and determined glance. “I will fight for him. Surely he would shelter you.”
“At worst, Tsurje,” said Jhorka, “some of us will lose our lives, and the rest will fly a few metres away.”
Slowly, the villagers seemed to mull over the conversation, and in a few minutes, Jhorka said, “I propose that we first bury Nem’s grandmother in the first clearing that we can find, and make a frame of branches to carry Nem on. We are a day’s walk from Mertown, if I calculate correctly. Let’s do our best for the ones that still live.”
“I agree,” said Mia. After some prompting from the youth, the women around Verna also agreed, and this seemed to dissipate a weight the crowd was unconsciously carrying.
The burial was a sad affair. Nem’s mother came over to hand the weak Nem to Verna's care while she performed what little of the rites could be observed. Under normal circumstances, there would have been a funeral and her ashes floated out to sea in a box of tightly woven sticks. Here, the old woman was simply buried, with a crudely made stone pitcher marking the spot. Nem cried in fits, and his fever increased manifold. Around afternoon, just as his makeshift litter was finished, he took Verna’s hand in his hot and clammy fingers and whispered, “Show me more magic.”
Then his eyelids drooped.
“Nem!” gasped his mother. “Lady Princess, please do something.”
“He has to eat, mistress. He has to have a cool, dry place,” said Verna, fighting the terror and uncertainty inside her. “I can magically induce sleep for some time. It will give him a better chance.”
“Will it help any?” asked the mother, determination in her eyes. “Will it keep him living till you could help him more?”
Verna didn’t know if she could help him more.
“Yes. It would let his body fight the things it must.”
“Do it,” said the mother.
Verna hesitated, wondering if her hands would harm the little boy instead. But then she remembered little Jacub in the same position, his head between her hands as she told him a story. If she could help him, she could also help Nem.
Whatever the results, she must try.
2.
From Verna’s hurried survey of Suva’s geography, Mertown was an unremarkable town hidden in the forests of south-east Suva, notable only for its insulation. The reality, when she and her hundreds of refugees came upon it, was quite different. The place was bustling with gossip while people gawked at them from eateries, a random song playing at a liquor house. The most dynamic of its conversationalists tried to engage the villagers, but was politely refused any response, even after the donation of an entire slice of bread. This was not because Jhorka had asked them to keep to themselves, but more because the villagers felt like sheep walking into a slaughterhouse.
Verna, for her part, had left the rest of the villagers in an empty field to wait. She took Jhorka with her, and they trudged toward the cleaner side of the town. At the gate of what was clearly the governor’s mansion, Verna asked the guards, “Who rules here?”
“Look ahead, lady. No begging here,” muttered one of the three guards, while the other two gripped their rifles and tried to look menacing. It was not effective due to the sorry state of their garments.
“I am Princess Verna Woodman, and if you don’t answer me, I shall have you dismissed for discourtesy to your duty.”
The threat hung in the air. Verna, on the other hand, looked like a fishwife’s daughter, with tangled hair and torn garments, smelling of sweat, mud, and unfortunately, children’s snot. Still, the natural authority that she exuded was beyond them, that only an aristocrat could embody — or so she hoped.
“I am Osaif himself,” another of the guards twirled his moustache.
Sighing, Verna moved through the gate. One of the guards came on her way and she made them all trip by making the ground roll a bit. “Run!” she shouted at the alarmed Jhorka, making the old woman bolt after her and through the bewildered guards.
Once inside, they slowed down to a brisk walk. The courtyard made Verna feel like she was waking up after many days. The mansion was rather squat, with rooms and sheds added helter-skelter amidst lines and lines of pillars. The paint was of garish sunset colours, giving the impression of a hideous fire. However, the doorknobs were of gleaming bronze, and as they travelled inside the building, the walls became lined with figurines of crystal, gold, and platinum. The halls and staircases were of marble, and the carpets she could see were made of rich velvet. It was a disaster for eyesight, and a good deal more ambitious than many wings of the Winter Palace. A cold rage took hold of her, and that was a good thing. It would tide her through what was coming.
“Verna?” whispered Jhorka, worried at her angry countenance.
“Relax. I will handle it,” said Verna under her breath.
They barged into a dining room where the lady of the mansion sat, along with a slight man with quick eyes. The lady, looking tacky in her ornamented gown, was presiding over what seemed like a twenty-course meal. The man looked extremely bored, and his eyes lit up so brightly at Verna’s appearance that she might have been his long-lost sister.
“Yes?” said asked the woman, looking offended and subtly shielding her nose.
“I am the emperor’s emissary, My Lady,” announced Verna, adding an extra bite to her words. “There have been allegations of wasteful spending and misgovernance in the provinces.”
“Why are you here?” the lady barked. “And why are you dressed like that?”
“I am Verna Woodman, going from town to town on the emperor’s orders,” Verna repeated patiently. “Please co-operate with my investigation.”
“Excuse me? Who do you think you’re talking to? And tell your nurse to look away.”
Jhorka looked amused at being thought a royal nurse.
“Lady, my people are hungry are tired, all because this province is not looked after well. That is why we look like this. And that is why many of them don’t have the time to continue this chitchat.”
The lady stood up now, looking for guards available to throw them out. There were none so far.
“Lady Ija, if I may?” inquired the man politely.
“Atri, not now!” snapped Ija. “Guards? Who let these characters in?”
“My Lady, you trust me because I have been to a lot of places in the Empire, including the royal palace. I have seen the Princess Verna, an honour not many would have had. As unbelievable as this is, I did notice an oval mark on her wrist even then, when she was a child.”
“Atri, not now,” sighed Ija. “I’m not surprised the girl would have had marks, but if this is a princess, I’m Osaif.”
“If you can remember the mark on my wrist,” Verna raised her hand, “you would also remember the royal palace, wouldn’t you?”
Before the man could nod, Verna had grabbed his left sleeve with her grimy right, and channeled her memories of the royal palace, starting with the wide steps made of granite, then to all the places he would have been taken to, possibly as an official on duty. She showed him every book on the library accessible to visitors, every scratch on the armoury's door, and even the plates and spoons used by the staff. With sudden inspiration, and giddy from the use of her magic, Verna grabbed Ija’s hand as well, and the woman hardly had time to recoil before she, too, was subjected to the visions. Verna finally let go of both of their hands, and they uniformly staggered back, Atri clutching his head.
“Need any more proof?”
“No,” said Ija petulantly. “Witch,” she whispered.
“No, My Lady. How can we assist you in your inquiries?” asked Atri, standing back up with a glinting glance Verna did not like.
“I have over three-hundred subjects, mostly women and children, in dire need of food, water and medical care, not to mention clean shelter. Arrange for it right away. This,” she said, indicating Jhorka, “is their headwoman, so discuss arrangements with her first. Once I am satisfied they are taken care of, I will join you, and we will go over the accounts and other management documents of this town. Questions?”
Ija started muttering loudly about vagrants and wastage of money, but a look from Verna shut her up. After a moment, Atri agreed. “No, Your Highness. We will cooperate with you, and I will see to the arrangements right away.”
On the way out, Verna stumbled slightly from her exhaustion. The mind magic, normally taxing, had taken most of her remaining energy. Jhorka’s hand shot out and gripped her to prevent her from falling. The woman said to Verna, “You have done right by us like you said. Let’s say no more on this subject.”
So she overrode Jhorka’s adamant rebukes about her need to rest with stony silence and started to wobble back towards where the rest of the villagers waited.
