He felt something in his chest. Something warm, comfortable, gentle.
Then came the sounds of the camp.
Hrafn opened his eyes slowly and found the source of that comfort: a man not much older than himself, kneeling beside him, both hands spread over his chest. A dull white glow leaked from his fingers and poured through his flesh in calm waves, running inside his ribs.
When he noticed Hrafn had woken, the man drew his hands back and nodded. Hrafn merely nodded in return. He preferred it that way.
The man remained there, leaning back a little, looking at him with an expression that seemed like pity.
Hrafn paid it little mind. They said those blessed by white usually had soft hearts. It made sense. One had to, to choose to feel another's pain when there was already enough pain in the world for any honest man.
He lifted his left hand and ran his fingers through his hair, pushing it back. Then he brought his right hand to his waist, seeking the comfort of the sword's cold hilt.
But it was not there. Neither the sword. Nor the hand. Nor any arm at all.
Pain rose from the back of his neck and ran down his spine like hot metal, spreading to the emptiness where the limb ought to have been. A brutal, intimate, absurd shock. The cry tore through his throat before he could contain it.
The memory came back all at once: the first fallen one collapsing beneath the hersir, the firm line of the voroirs, the closed forest, the smell of blood, the break. And the price.
Yes, he had had to choose between being impaled through the chest or through the shoulder. But with voroirs nearby, he had thought he might still keep the limb. That some white would stitch it back to the flesh, that the Hird would wrench some miracle out of the Veil's ribs and return him whole. If he had enough luck.
But when was it that I ever had enough damned luck?
"Do not try to move the lost arm, brother," the voroir beside him said. His voice held a polished pity that Hrafn already hated before hearing it through. "Your mind does not yet understand the loss. Every time you try to move it you will feel agony."
The man's megin poured relief over his wounded flesh, muffling some of the fire running through his nerves. "But with training and time, you will be able to grow used to it."
Ah, good, very simple, isn't it, idiot, just get used to it.
"I'll keep that in mind," Hrafn replied after a few moments.
The voroir nodded, satisfied.
Hrafn hated people who poured their weight onto others in order to muffle their own anguish. That sort of kindness had always seemed more a comfort to the giver than to the one receiving it. Even so, he bit back the irritation. The man was a voroir. And given what he was, perhaps one day he would end even more miserable than Hrafn.
He lay back down and drew a deep breath. The air smelled of earth, old sweat, soaked cloth, and blood. A great deal of blood.
The voroir's megin soothed, but it did not erase. Every impulse of his mind toward the absent arm brought fresh agony, as if the body refused to accept the loss.
He tried to think of something else.
Looking on the bright side had always been one of his better abilities. Or at least pretending that he had.
A few things occurred to him soon enough.
He would never again have to look at the dock employer's damned face.
Now he was a noble.
A one-armed noble, true, but a noble all the same.
And there were his new capabilities as well.
That almost drew a smile out of him.
Almost, because even smiling hurt.
"Do not feel so bad," the young voroir declared, apparently understanding something wrong. "There is much a voroir can achieve with only one limb. Color inclines the megin, but it does not define everything. I have seen brothers fight with one hand, with one eye, with broken ribs. I have seen-"
Hrafn let the voice trickle down into the bottom of the world.
Did he feel like a wreck? Without question.
Resigned? Not even close.
The more he thought about his own condition and the more some crooked remnant of a smile escaped him, the more hurried the voroir's voice became. The man began listing all the things one could still do without an arm.
Hrafn let him talk to himself and sank back into the memories of the battle.
The memory of having felt so much still troubled him, but it fascinated him too.
As far as he knew, those blessed by green were almost like the whites in their strange nature. The difference was that white touched flesh and pain, while green seemed to sink its fingers into older things. Deeper things.
Every voroir was already stronger than a common man. But some were less made for war than others.
In that world, that was almost a sin.
Even so, what had passed through him that night had not felt like weakness.
Quite the opposite.
When he remembered the state he had been in, the smell of blood, it did not seem he had sensed it only with his nose.
It did not even seem like smell.
It was as if the blood itself were flowing over him.
As if everything had its own weight, heat, and direction. As if the blood of the whole world knew exactly where it wanted to run, and for an instant he had known as well.
The feeling came again with the thought, though weaker.
Even inside the tent, even without seeing, he could tell the camp was awake around him. Dark makeshift awnings trembled in the wind. Some wounded men moaned softly. Others no longer moaned at all. Men walked between small fires, dirty armor, cloths tied to stumps, thighs, and torsos.
And all of it reached him strangely.
The wind did not blow only against his skin. It came from many sides, from many places, in too many ways. There was the gust high in the treetops. There was the crawling between the tents. There was the tiny movement close along the ground, passing between buried roots and cold stones.
Hrafn frowned. Beneath the earth there was more: dampness, roots, the dark matter of the soil embracing whatever fell into it.
And that brought him, without warning, a memory of Saga's story.
The Green Ruin.
Their bodies became part of the soil.
The phrase rose clear in his head, and with it came a sensation. It was nearness. As though at last he understood, if only by a finger's width, what was wrong and sacred in that old story.
Part of the soil.
He looked past the white healer and sensed, a few paces away, a strip of turned earth where dark blood had been absorbed. There was a silent voracity there he would not have known how to name. The ground drank. Without hurry.
And what disturbed him most was that it did not seem monstrous.
Only ancient. Natural. As if the forest, the earth, and the blood held between them a conversation too old for men to call cruelty.
A chill ran along the back of his neck. Almost as if, for a moment, he too were part of that. One thread among threads, one limb of something larger and silent.
The sensation vanished as quickly as it had come, but left a trace. Hrafn drew a deeper breath.
"Are you feeling something?" the white voroir asked, perhaps finally noticing that Hrafn had not been listening to him for some time.
Hrafn took a moment before answering.
"Hunger," he lied.
The other gave a small laugh, perhaps relieved to hear something ordinary.
"That is good. It means the body wishes to continue."
Hrafn did not answer. He looked through the opening of the tent, toward the dark line of trees where the forest began. In the light, the trunks looked like old columns in a roofless hall.
And perhaps that was exactly what it was.
Perhaps his perception of time had come nearer to theirs for a brief instant. Not the time of men, measured in breaths, fears, and small urgencies, but the time of those things that remain still while everything around them is born, rots, and sinks.
The thought should have frightened him more. Instead, it brought a crooked comfort.
He had lost an arm, but had awakened to something else. Something strange, ancient, perhaps horrible, perhaps useful, perhaps both.
He moved his shoulder lightly by reflex and the phantom pain returned, savage, knocking the air from him. He shut his eyes and waited for the wave to pass, his jaw clenched so hard he thought a tooth might crack.
When the agony retreated, what remained to him was only the weariness and that new perception, deep, unsettling, lurking beneath the skin.
An arm was still a high price.
But it was beginning to seem less absurd.