Waking up was a conscious choice now, the same way Jinyel could choose to take a step or to measure his breathing. He had to measure his breathing, or he wouldn’t breathe at all. As his adrenaline ebbed away, so too did the blanket it had thrown over his pain.
He was injured. Badly. And it was real in a way no dream-wolf ever could be. He woke up because he needed to. He chose to. How long had he slept? The wolves had run as swift as thought and laid siege for what felt like an age. But with the glow of a hearthfire and the chorus of insects all around, it had to still be nighttime.
“Another compress,” an old, feminine voice echoed above him. “The bleeding has slowed. Either the next one will stop it, or the one after that.”
Someone ran through the Keha’al leadership tent, and weathered hands traced Jinyel’s shoulders. The hands caught on his back, and cloth which lay there. Cloth which peeled away, and with it, the illusion of skin.
Jinyel breath choked him as air hit raw muscle. He tried to flex away from those hands, but he couldn’t move. The barest twitch of his arm pulled every muscle along his spine. Had he been skinned? Was that why his back was so hot and cold at the same time?
Was that why his head was swimming just from the effort of waking up?
Through the fog of pain, he remembered words. A teacher. Blood loss was followed by lightheadedness. Who had told him that? Why couldn’t he remember?
“Hunter, are you awake? Can you hear me?”
The Keha tried to turn his head. He jerked away, even though it agonized him anew. She reached for him again, and he clawed his bloody bedding into knots to evade her.
She halted. Sat back on her heels. Jinyel remembered how to breathe, and then he met her gaze.
He could not speak with his mutated tongue. But his eyes spoke for him. Yesterday, he thought it had been a coincidence to dream of her. Another coincidence that she woke up with a broken arm after he dreamed of striking her.
He knew better now.
The stag had learned how to use its horns.
He watched with thin satisfaction as her breath caught. She said nothing, but he saw her mind working to make sense of his injury. Of his scathing glare. Of his bitter silence. He owed her no words, no more than he owed to the ‘prince’ who had broken his dreamscape to pieces.
It was the Loktul that brought noise, when he followed the Keha’s apprentice into Jinyel’s section. The floor mats around them were covered with bloody rags, which Jinyel soon came to recognize as his own clothes. Bundles of medicinal herbs and bandages were laid all around, along with two mortars and pestles coated with hastily-made tinctures.
Someone’s life had been saved here.
His own life, probably.
“Hunter.” The Loktul looked between Jinyel and the Keha. “What happened?”
The Keha didn’t answer immediately. She looked at Jinyel, and Jinyel looked at her.
“His dreams were attacked,” the Keha eventually answered. “By a Nightmare Beast?”
Her question was pointed at Jinyel. With his slow, twisted tongue, Jinyel spat out the words one by one:
“Beasts… are not… the only… stalkers… of dreamscapes.”
“Dreamscape.” Her gaze sharpened. “Who told you that word?”
“Will it attack the tribe?” The Loktul sat beside them, voice turning hard. “The Beast that did this to you, what happened to it? What happened to you?”
Jinyel dragged one arm under himself. Then the other. Then one knee.
“Stay down.” The Keha grabbed his arm. “Your back has been―”
Flesh. Not his own. His magic lashed at her as quickly as it had done in his dream. Not an attempt to change her flesh, because even his spark knew she wasn’t trying to adhere him, but a sweep of pain down his arm and into hers.
The Keha jerked back with a yelp. The Loktul leaned between them as if Jinyel had any power to strike her, and placed his hand on Jinyel’s arm just as the Keha had done.
His magic lashed the Loktul, too. The Loktul recoiled the same as his partner. He opened his mouth to shout, but the Keha put a hand on his shoulder.
“Your bleeding,” she snapped at Jinyel. “You’ve just made it worse.”
Jinyel didn’t care. He knew it was foolish, but he dragged himself onto trembling hands and knees. It was real heat that ran down his sides as he bled.
“Lay down!” Now the Keha was angry as she reached for him.
“Don’t touch me.” It was easier to speak when he let his tongue unroll. It took so much effort to keep it inside. Keep it hidden. To pretend his differences weren’t piling up like snow upon a steep slope.
The Keha pulled off her shawl, unafraid. “Easily done.”
She wrapped the cloth around her hands and pulled Jinyel’s knees out from under him. He screamed when he hit the ground, and again when she pinned him down. He had no strength to struggle, there was no touch of her skin to magick, but he tried anyway.
“Stay back,” she calmly ordered the Loktul. “He couldn’t hurt a rabbit in this state.”
“The Nightmare beast,” the Loktul said.
“We won’t learn anything if he dies tonight. Which he might, if he keeps up this struggling. My apprentice, did she get the compress? I need her.”
Jinyel failed to thrash. The Loktul went to find the apprentice. The Keha leaned over Jinyel to growl:
“You’ve got no antlers here. If you keep fighting, you will fall unconscious.”
“I’ll fight… there… too.”
“You’d rather die than let me help?”
“Yes.”
“Too bad.”
The apprentice returned with a bowl of ointment. She knelt beside Jinyel and reached out to touch him, but the Keha caught her wrist.
“Don’t touch him,” the Keha said. “Don’t even get in arm’s reach.”
At least one person in Idalos listened to the words out of Jinyel’s mouth. Not that the Keha followed any of them.
Jinyel tried to pitch sideways, but the Keha would not be unseated from him. She smeared something across his wound with rough, swift strokes. Jinyel screamed a third time.
This time, his scream was answered with a shriek.
The air thudded with wingbeats, although nothing struck the tent. Elraya didn’t understand that tents were flexible; all the thairoch knew was that this was a building, and that Jinyel was inside it, and that Jinyel was screaming.
The Keha yanked Jinyel’s head back to loop a bandage around his chest. Dry cloth pressed across his back, trapping the ointment beneath it.
“You are my guest―” She got an arm around his neck. “―living in my tent―” She wrapped the bandage around his chest and back again, once, twice. “―and you will not die here.”
She pulled the bandage tight. Jinyel’s vision went white with pain. For a moment, he felt the dreamscape again. He saw the forest around him, the path of broken trees and the rubble of an enormous building he couldn’t remember.
But he was no passive dreamer now. He could leave this place by choice.
He followed Elraya’s cry back to his body, and his pain became real again. The blood became wet. The bandages scratched, the furs under his face congealed with his blood and saliva.
“―to control his―” Mumbling. “―animal, we can’t―” Couldn’t hear. “―in the dark.”
Once again, Jinyel dragged his limbs inward. His back was lighter now. The Keha wasn’t sitting on him anymore. Nothing stopped him from rising onto his hands and knees.
“He’s getting up!” the apprentice cried. “Keha, he’s―”
“Let him.” The Keha stood with her bloody hands placed irritably on her hips. “Restraining a Loshova will do no good to anyone. Him, least of all.”
Beside her stood the Loktul, distrust in his eye as he pointed at Jinyel.
“Call off your… whatever it is,” he commanded. “You bat. Your winged thing.”
Jinyel hauled himself up to one knee. The poultice dragged against the flayed muscle of his back. The ointment numbed him. He wondered what was in the ointment.
Elraya landed beside the tent with another frustrated screech.
“Call it off,” the Loktul repeated.
Jinyel got to both knees. With slow twists of his tongue he said:
“Let. Me. Out.”
“You’re out of your mind,” the Keha said. “There’s nothing for you out there but cold, pain, and infection.”
His silence was response enough. She bared her teeth and lifted the edge of the canvas.
“Die as you will, Loshova,” she snapped. “So long as it isn’t in this tent.”
On shaking knees, Jinyel crawled out of the tent. The night wind sighed to greet him, and Elraya let out a relieved cry. The thairoch knelt as close to his level as it could, brushing against his back. When he hissed in pain, Elraya recoiled.
Elraya cared for him. Jinyel had known it in an intellectual way, in the animal’s chirps and games, but it was a different thing to know that Elraya had heard his screams. Horses ran away from danger. Elraya ran toward it. No hesitation, no fear ― Jinyel had called out, and Elraya had come.
Nothing had ever done that for him before.
Jinyel folded over the thairoch’s shoulder, and the thairoch bore his full weight gladly. He took a moment just to breathe, and to let something else carry him.
There came the rustle of wood and leather as his possessions were put out behind him. The wall of the tent dropped down, and the light of the hearthfire was gone.
Other Keha’al had left their tents to see what the commotion was about, and many of them eyed Jinyel with confusion. There was no shirt to hide the enormous swath of bandages on his back, or the blood coating his shoulders. Yet no healer rushed out to claim him, nor did any warriors brandish their spears.
He was injured, and he was alone. Except for Elraya.
That was fine. It had always been fine. Jinyel had survived with less company, and rebuilt himself out of nothing before. He gathered his things with trembling hands and secured Elraya’s saddle as best as he could. It wasn’t tight, it wouldn’t stay for long, but Jinyel didn’t need it to. He just needed to saddle to stay long enough to get away from here. To make himself alone again, except for the one creature who had ever tried to save him.
Jinyel pulled himself onto Elraya’s back and tied himself into the saddle. It was necessary, even though it hurt. He knew he couldn’t stay seated by strength alone. He trusted Elraya to keep him safe regardless.
With no word to the onlookers, and no glance back at the tent which had sheltered him, Jinyel whistled Elraya off the ground and into the open plains.
