Daughter of Dragons

Chapter 12-1

Chapter 12

A fortnight passed—two of the longest, most stressful weeks that Liselle had ever endured. This wasn’t due to The Rogue, who had ducked back into deepest hiding after Pieter’s murder, but Lathwi. Awake now and on the mend, the woman was without a doubt the world’s worst patient: quick-tempered and demanding; opinionated and argumentative; and as stubborn as the day was long.

First, there had been the water closet incident.

The morning after Lathwi’s return to full consciousness, Liselle had been reading by the fire when a heavy thud echoed down the hallway. Fearing only Dreamer-knew-what, she’d gone bounding into Lathwi’s room to find her in an agonized huddle on the floor. The shapeless cotton nightgown she was wearing was limp with sweat.

“What do you think you’re doing?” Liselle demanded.

“Need to use water closet,” Lathwi panted in reply. Her broken limbs were throbbing from the fall she had just taken, and it felt like she was breathing red-hot needles because of her cracked ribs, but she was determined to get to the midden so she would not foul her nesting place. She ground the pain into a paste between her teeth, then dragged herself onto her elbows and knees, and started to crawl toward the hallway.

“What are you doing?” Liselle cried, appalled by the big woman’s willingness to suffer, and then raced over to the bed to fetch the thunder-mug which she had set there. “Here, use this! I’ll empty it for you when you’re done.”

The idea of somebody else cleaning up after her wastes offended Lathwi even more than the thought of soiling herself or her bed. She warned the sorceress away with a scowl, then continued on her way. Inch by agonizing inch, she worked her way out of the room, down the hall and into the water closet. She would’ve crawled all the way back to bed afterward, too, if Liselle hadn’t gotten her a crutch in the meantime.

Liselle shook her head, still bristling with remembered awe and outrage. Anyone else would have accepted the mug and still considered themselves a hero for bearing the indignity. What was it that drove Lathwi to such extremes?

Those extremes provoked another confrontation a few days later, during the physician’s weekly visit.

Liselle supposed that she herself had instigated the incident by tattling on Lathwi. But at the time, she had been mad because the pig-headed b***h refused stay in bed where she so obviously belonged.

“Got to challenge bones,” Lathwi tried to explain before the doctor’s arrival. “I stay on back till pain goes away, I never get up again.”

“That’s nonsense,” Liselle argued. “You’ve got to give your body some time to rest and heal.”

Lathwi shrugged, then proceeded to take another painful lap around the room. And so when the physician finally came to call, Liselle told him all about his patient’s misdoings; and he, a sour-faced ex-military man with set opinions about how women should behave, went huffing into Lathwi’s room just as she was climbing back into bed. Blustering with righteous indignation, he rushed over and grabbed her crutch.

“That’s enough foolishness out of you, young woman,” he said, shaking the forked stick in her face. “If I catch you out of bed again before I give you my consent, I’ll give you a thrashing you’ll never forget.”

Her eyes narrowed into slits. Her upper lip curled back to bare her teeth. Without further warning, she then seized him by the throat with her good hand and pulled him to within an inch of her nose.

“You hit me,” she said in her most threatening tone, “I eat you.”

Surprise rippled across the physician’s puckered face, then hardened into a look of tight-lipped acquiescence. He lowered the crutch, then started his examination. As he did so, his rigid air began to decompose. He muttered something several times, then finally turned to Liselle with a hint of suspicion or perhaps wonder in his flinty eyes.

“Did you use some sort of healing spell on this woman?” he asked.

“No,” Liselle replied. The yellow pyramid was her only source of healing power; and that only worked on arcane woes. There was nothing magical about broken bones. “Why do you ask?”

“Her recovery is most remarkable,” he explained, turning to look at Lathwi again. “Her ribs are more than half-mended already; and judging from the range of motion that I’ve seen, so are the bones in her wrist and leg. Even her facial scars are starting to scab off and turn pink.”

Lathwi did not seem the least bit surprised or pleased by this pronouncement. It was as if she had expected no less of herself. Her flawless composure in the face of such good news roused the physician’s curiosity.

“Well, woman,” he said gruffly. “What say you? Do you know what brought this medical wonder to pass?”

“Hard work,” she told him, just as she had tried to tell Liselle earlier. Then, because he had asked, and she did not care if he knew, she disclosed the other factor that had made her quickened recovery possible. “Mother’s milk, too.”

He snorted derisively, then packed up his instruments. On his way out the door, he turned to Liselle and said, “I’ll be back next week. In the interim, keep her diet simple—no distilled spirits or red meat.”

At the time, Liselle had accepted his instructions with the meekest sort of gratitude. Now, after a week of Lathwi’s near-constant complaining, she was ready to stuff them down his lizard-like throat. Their latest go-around on the matter had taken place this very morning.

Lathwi had been sitting up in bed when Liselle entered the room with her breakfast. As soon as she saw the bowl of boiled cereal, she hissed and then turned her head away like a spoiled child.

“Not want porridge,” she said, accenting the last word like the vilest of curses. “Want meat.”

“You can have some broth for lunch,” Liselle countered.

“Not want stupid broth. Want red, raw meat.”

“You heard the physician. He said no distilled spirits or red meat.”

“Physician no like me. He say just for spite.”

“Maybe,” Liselle said, although by now she was convinced that any spite involved was aimed at her. “But until he says otherwise, that’s the way it’s going to be. So why don’t you just shut up and eat?”

Lathwi pushed the tray away. “Not want. You teach me reading now.”

“You need to eat,” Liselle insisted. Then, determined to have her own way for a change, she added, “I’m not going to teach you a blessed thing until that porridge is gone.”

With that, she had turned on her heel and marched out of the room.

A full hour later, Lathwi called her back into the room and then pointed at the empty bowl. “Porridge be gone,” she said, with no trace of anger or rancour in her tone. “Now you teach me reading.”

Despite her attempts to suppress it, a ghost of a smile curled across Liselle’s lips. She had finally bested Lathwi in a contest of wills! And as trivial as that victory might be, still it gave her a feeling of formidability and control. Girlishly giddy now, she carried the breakfast dishes out to the kitchen and then returned with a tray layered with fine white sand.

“Sand for cleaning scales, not reading,” Lathwi stated. “Where book?”

“In order to read, you must first recognize the runes,” Liselle said, and then traced two figures in the sand. The first one seemed like a poor rendition of a foot; the second was more beetle-like.

“This rune is called ‛dhe’,” she said, pointing to the first figure, “and that’s the sound it represents. The one next to it is called ‛ai’. By themselves, they are symbols. Together, they form a word.” She exaggerated the shape of her mouth as she strung the two symbols into a single sound. “Dhai—which is the word for the span of time between dawn and dusk.

“Do you understand?”

Lathwi was speechless with admiration and delight. At first, these rune-things had seemed like frogs on a pond—lots of noise, but little to eat. But when Liselle put the two frogs together, they became an entirely different beast. Day—she knew that word, Pieter had taught it to her. Now his not-mother had given her its shape. The symmetry within the lesson pleased her.

At Liselle’s prompting, she sketched her own version of the runes into the sand and spoke their Names. “‛Dhe.’ ‛Ai’. Dhai,” she recited. Then, spurred by a playful impulse, she reversed the order of the sounds. “Aiidhe. What that mean?”

“Aid is another word for help,” the sorceress explained dryly. “And now that you’ve grasped the fundamental concepts of reading and writing, let’s move on.” She erased the slate with the palm of her hand, then fingered a new shape into the sand. “This rune is called argh…”

The lesson continued, rune after rune after rune. Then, as Liselle drew what looked like an inverted dhe in the sand, her eyes suddenly misted over. “This one is called pye,” she said mournfully. “Pye for Pieter.”

Lathwi dutifully reproduced the shape and its sound, but Liselle didn’t respond with her usual nod or grunt. Instead, she lowered her head and just sat there in silence. This did not strike Lathwi as odd: Taziem had often gone chasing after an exciting thought in the middle of a lesson. Then Liselle began to shake and sniffle. Taziem had never done that!

“You sick?” she wondered.

Liselle looked up. To Lathwi’s horror and fascination, her green eyes were brimming with tears. “Oh, Lathwi,” she moaned. “Don’t you miss him?”

“Who ‛him’?”

“You know,” she replied, and then blurted, “Pieter!”

Lathwi did not want to talk about Pieter. It served no useful purpose. So she shrugged and then stated the obvious in the hope of reminding Liselle that they had more important things to do. “Pieter gone.”

“How can you say that so calmly?” the sorceress grated. There was both an accusation and a plea for enlightenment in her tone. Lathwi chose to address the plea, although she was rather surprised that she should have to explain something so basic to one as learned as Liselle.

“Long or short, all paths come to same end someday.”

Liselle’s teary eyes began to drip. “True. But Pieter didn’t deserve to come to the end of his so early in life or in so vile a manner. It’s my fault he’s dead.”

“You kill?”

“Not with my own two hands,” Liselle replied. “But I might as well have for all the good I did when he needed me. I should’ve stayed awake that night. I could’ve done it if I had only tried a little harder.”

“You no can challenge sleep,” Lathwi told her. “Sleep always win.”

“Then I never should have let him stay here in the first place!” Liselle argued.

Lathwi snorted then. “I see. You want be not-happy.”

“I do not!” She drew herself erect, then scrubbed her eyes dry with the back of her hand. “What an awful thing to say about a person.”

By now, it was clear to Lathwi that the sorceress didn’t want to hear what she had to say, so she hauled the tray back onto her lap and began to review the runes that she’d learned so far. As she did so, Liselle stared at her, all resentment and grief. How could the woman be so cold? And how dare she imply that Liselle enjoyed being miserable? It was just that she felt so responsible. And so terribly guilty. She should have—

Sudden impatience grabbed her by the shoulders and shook her then. Lathwi was right. She wasn’t mourning Pieter, she was torturing herself. The dead had no use for should-haves, could-haves or did-nots.

And, she thought then, the living had no time for them.

“That’s all for today,” she told Lathwi, and stood up to leave. As an afterthought, she added, “Thank you.”

Lathwi shrugged, then sketched another rune in the sand: pye. For Pieter.

And porridge, she thought, as the smell of boiled cereal edged its way out of the thunder-mug where she had dumped it. For no reason she could name, she smiled.

G

“This book stupid,” Lathwi complained, as Liselle came strolling into the room with lunch.

“Really?” Liselle asked, in an utterly unconcerned tone. “Let me hear something you find offensive.”

She tracked down a particularly absurd passage and began to read in a slow, steady voice:

“Roses are red,

Violets are blue.

Sugar is sweet,

And so are you.”

“That was very good,” Liselle told her. “And have you noticed? Your speech is improving. Pretty soon, you’ll be as well-spoken as the governor himself.”

“Is stupid,” Lathwi stubbornly insisted. She recognized the words. Roses and violets were flowers; red and blue were colours; and sugar was the substance that made candy so sweet. But what did any of those things have to do with her? “Make no make sense.”

“I told you to read it, not critique it,” Liselle said. “Think of it as a vocabulary exercise.”

“My vo-cab-u-lary,” she countered, taking elaborate care to emphasize each syllable, “is full of flowers and songbirds and butterflies. Those things got nothing to do with magic.”