Chapter 1 (in the indigo woods)
“I’ll tell you my name, if you tell me yours,” the voice from the woods tickles my mind, whispered on the wings of yesterday’s mist.
“I’ll tell you my name,” echoes the whisper, through late night meals in the Empress’ palace, cold leftovers from everyone’s third meals, soup and water and buttered bread.
“Tell me yours,” it asks, following me skipping through the winding, high-arched hallways to the healers’ wing.
“I’ll tell you my name.” It lurks with me around each patient’s bedside, creaking in the seats I climb into, rustling in the gray sheets, rasping in the stitching of my skin-magic that mends cuts earned over the night.
“If you tell me yours,” the memory of the mist says, to the movement of Head Healer’s cracked lips, explaining something crucial about the fighters who returned last night, none of which makes it into my ears.
I nod to Head Healer, and she turns, her black gown sweeping the stone floors, gray fingers pulling a mask over her mouth. She disappears into her office, behind a crusty wood door at the end of the healers’ wing.
“I’ll tell you my name,” it whispers, races up my heart, and I run through my rounds in the healers’ hall, checking all the patients in the rows of gray beds beneath moon-round windows, streaming sunbeams.
My hands shake out the rhythm, “If you tell me yours,” endlessly. It laces my skin magic, while it pulls together gashes over elbows, backs of knees, bridges of noses--places where the joints of armor exposed thin mail or bare skin.
The other night workers have already ended their shifts, having done most of the hard labor to fix up the sick and near dying soldiers.
I get the late night/almost morning watches almost wholly to myself ever since a group of healers went out to the battlefront to learn field medicine practice. A part of me doesn’t want them to return, it’s nice being the only healer around, as opposed to the youngest.
“I’ll tell you my name, if you tell me yours.”
The woods behind the palace beckon me to come play, but after rounds of the main beds, I have to check on the long-term patients, down the stairs into the basement, sheltered from the windows.
I pause beside Head Healer’s door, ear against iron bars crossing vertical planks of wood, and her footsteps echo on the tile so she hasn’t gone to bed yet.
Slippers soft, I pad back across the length of the healers’ hall, over mosaics of night beams striking down enemies, under the high arched ceilings glistening black. The healers’ hall exits into the main hallway back to the kitchen, but tucked between two bookcases in the left corner on your way out, a stone arch takes you down to the basement. The spiral steps ooze damp; black moss grows; making the going treacherous. I ball my hands into fists, stepping between the sagging bookcases and squeezing my oversized smock against my sides.
“I’ll tell you my name, if you tell me yours.” It makes my skin break out in goosebumps, gives my squishy steps sure footings.
I’m supposed to check on the long term patients three times a shift, so I do, even if Head Healer’s gone to bed early or I technically drag my shift late into the day, with no one supervising me. I do it three times a shift, but I can’t ever see anything.
I count the steps, hand tracing the outer wall. At fifteen I walk forward, and my knee strikes the edge of a cot. It vibrates. Quivering, I reach a hand down, touching cold skin. Hair. A pulse beats beneath me. I quest out with my skin magic, but can’t determine anything about the occupant. But, they’re alive. So I shuffle around the bed, onto the second one.
We had four long-term patients last night. Tonight, there are three.
“If you tell me yours,” seems to whisper from the fourth bed, cold and empty. I don’t know where the patient went; dead, healed--maybe that’s what Head Healer told me.
I shuffle through the pitch black basement, returning to the stairs. “I’ll tell you mine” calls me upward, I slip on a step but catch myself on my hands, the black moss faintly silhouetted. I climb to my feet, ascending slower.
“I’ll tell you mine.” It lures me back to Head Healer’s door. No footsteps, no whispered chants, just steady breathing. I count to ten, Head Healer still making no other sounds. I count to twenty--still silence.
Scurrying, I speed out of the healer’s hall, back to the kitchen, out the doorway into the courtyard in the early dawn, cobblestone paths winding around lawns of black-capped mushrooms and twisted pine trees. In the corner of the courtyard, beneath tall trees shedding sharp pine needles, there’s a sewer tunnel winding under the storage wing of the palace, spilling out into the meadows surrounding the palace.
The heavy grate over it came loose way before I found it, and chunks of stone cracked from the arched roof, tumbling and scattering amongst the pine needles. I hop from the cobblestone path onto a flat chunk of stone, then to another, and a third, then I wobble and stumble into the dirt, so I have died in the sun slave gunk again. I duck beneath the branches, stepping like a dying thing, slipping sideways into the sewer tunnel. When it rains, the sewage liquid seeps out, flooding half the courtyard and watering the trees and mushrooms, but most days, this section of the tunnel’s only slightly damp underfoot.
I pad through the dark, hands folded over my shirt, breath echoing. “Come, I’ll tell you my name, if you tell me yours.”
It pulls me like a spell on my heart, out of the tunnel through the bars in the grate outside, into swaying meadow grasses. I peer up into the glaring sun in the blue sky, and the palace walls stand bare of watchers--who needs to watch the dark woods behind the palace, guarded from the open fields of fighting by a raging river?--but I have to check before running wantonly through the meadow into the shadow woods.
I spread my arms, and a breeze rustles my clothes; soft cotton, still clean after making my rounds in the healers’ hall. Sometimes, patients vomit on my clothes, or they smear blood up my smock, or screech things at me in their pain hallucinations, or get mucus on my pants.
By my clean outfit, the injured soldiers brought home last night must’ve been tame. The summer virus must have run its course through the camps. The fighting wasn’t bad, so the night healers weren’t overwhelmed and exhausted before my shift began.
Or maybe, the Sun Slaves are retreating.
I drop my arms to my sides. I pull the hood of my smock up and step away from the wall, walking through the grasses, green and whispering, carving aimless trails with my passing, so if anyone does come out to watch from the wall later, they won’t find a straight-arrow path directly from our sewer grate into the woods.
“Come,” that mist voice whispers in my memory, and I glance over my shoulder at the gleaming black palace again, all its bulbous spires and towering walls, before ducking under the tangled branches and indigo-blue leaves of the shadow woods.
***
The mist still waits for me, along the muddy edges of the brook. Tiny brown mushrooms cling to the soil there, competing with violet grasses and the pale moss. Clear fish, the size of my thumb, bob between underwater rocks, hunting tiny insects that ripple the water.
I drop to my knees in the grass and mushrooms, slippers squishing in the mud. I pull my hood off, safe from sight under the canopy of twining black branches and claw-shaped leaves. “I told you my name yesterday,” I say to the mist.
It roils and swirls, like it’s just plain mist, kicked up by the cool, babbling water.
“I know you can talk.” I hold my fists in my lap. “You asked me yesterday what my name was.” Then I dreamt about it, until I woke around midnight, and built a tiny hut out of my blankets thinking about it, and got dressed and ate two different meals thinking about it, and hurried through my rounds to come back here when the sun rose. “And I told you my name, even though you kept asking.” And the words shivered down my spine each time you repeated them.
The mist swirls.
“Can you not hear me? You said, ‘I’ll tell you my name, if you tell me yours,’ so I told you, but you haven’t told me your name yet. Remember? I had to hurry back and go to sleep yesterday, but now I have until sun high...”
Tendrils of mist rise, and I perk up, but they just dissipate into the air. I stare down at my fists. An animal chirps somewhere, in the distance. “My name’s One,” I say, like yesterday. “But...sometimes Head Healer calls me Odd One. Is that what you want?” I glance up. The mist ebbs. “Or...the Empress’ child calls me Rascal sometimes. And the kitchen aids call me Senseless. Like a joke, on account that I can’t taste anything. Except for hot foods, but that’s really just, your whole mouth on fire, so I don’t know if that counts as tasting, since everyone talks about tasting with your tongue. Or...” The violet grasses and mushrooms seem to listen. “I heal people.” My eyes flick up to the mist, which just keeps spinning and twisting. “If that’s what you mean by a name. A title?”
The mist flashes with light, and I jolt. “Heal people?” I whisper. “That’s what you want?”
Tendrils creep forward, over the mud and mushrooms. They don’t dissipate, instead glowing with a soft light washing out the grass. “Heal people?” the mist whispers, raspy. “You think your magichealspeople?”
My eyebrows furrow. “Then what do you call fixing wounds? Stitching up skin?”
A tendril of mist turns, like the head of an animal twisting to look up at me. “I call it burrowing into bodies and messing with their organs.”
I jab a finger into the mist. “Youcanhear me.”
“I call it adapting your magic in marvelous ways.”
“What’s your name, mist? I told you mine.”
The tendrils all stop, coiling on the grass before me. “Your name isn’t One.”
“Yes it is.”
“No, it’s really not.”
I kick at the tendril, the one that turns like a head. The glowy vapor scatters, then reforms around my stuck-out foot. “Yes it is. What would you know? You’re just talking mist.”
“I knew your parents.”
I rise to my feet, dusting off purple grass and squished gray mushrooms. “No you didn’t. The Lost Fortress is ages from here.” I turn and march from the clearing, ducking under thick branches and climbing over moss-covered rocks. “I’m stupid, I thought you wanted to be friends.”
From around the trunk of a tree, a mist-shape forms, blocking my way. Its arms wave at me. “The mist isn’t talking.” The mist-head swirls. “I am, through the mist.”
I stare at the dry ground, then back at the brook, then back at the hovering form of mist. “You left the water? I thought--” I shut my mouth.
The mist narrows, going taller and tighter. “You thought the brook was magic? What, like some magic water spawned some talking mist?”
“Why couldn’t it be magic water?”
The mist laughs, tinkling. “I speak and hear through the mist.” The glow pulses. “Ever hear of wraiths? The people who create them?”
My eyes grow round, and I grip the edges of my smock. “You can’t be a Sun Slave. How’d you make it to our forest?”
“And you think you’re a Night Warrior.” The mist sinks low to the ground, a formless cloud, still blocking my way forward. “Can’t I be a Day Warrior instead?”
“No.” I step away, crawling backwards over a boulder. “Leave me alone, if it’s information you want, I don’t know anything.” The mist doesn’t move, and I rise to my feet on top of the boulder, staring down at the white vapor. “Go away.”
“I’m not here to take information,” the mist whispers, the voice spreading all around me, hidden behind the trees and the grasses. Goosebumps prickle all over my skin and I turn, but only tangled branches and the clear brook water wait across the clearing and the muddy ground--nothing to help me fight a Sun Slave.
“Leave me alone.” My hands tighten into fists.
“I’m here togiveyou information,” the mist hisses, roiling, glowing. “You don’t know your real name, but I do.”
“Then why’d you ask me to give it? Why’d you say you’d tell me your name?”
“I wanted to know what you know,” the voice floats from all around, vibrating, dizzying. “And now I know that you don’t know.”
The tendrils of fog blocking my way break apart, receding behind the trees, leaving for me an open path of grass, trodden with my footsteps on my way here.
“We’re here to teach you,” the mist says, “Destroyer.”
It feels like a name.
“Whenever you’re ready,” the voice fades, softly.
My stomach clenches and sweat clings to my forehead, my armpits.
“Leave me alone,” I say. The mist doesn’t say anything back. Leaping from the rock, I sprint through the woods, red flowers smacking my smock, branches clinging to my cotton sleeves, tearing, staining. “Leave me alone!”
