Business and Pleasure (Sian)

[Mara]

Spring 42nd 512AV

Morning skirted in unnoticed, bells and chimes announcing the arrival of another pitch of dull light. Marvasa had gone to his hanging little house, from the Nest to his nest. It was unfamiliar, dusty, abandoned. In the corner, there was a table topped by a structure of books, a bed creased at the toe from restlessly kicking feet. The kitchen was bare except for the spiders that had sown into the configuration of every crack and open pantry door. There was no reason to stay there, he had only come back to lie down. His head still pounded under a tuft of brunette shag, a fair discoloration tinged about the side of his face where a knee had threatened to crush him. Fingertips dared not graze it or the knot that accompanied the discoloration’s center.

Work was close. Sian was close. He needed to be there to tell him of his discovery. That Jael's cage was a ball of silk that strung her from the rafters and the seduction song the nest played for her made of sedatives. A piece of him wanted to forget the whole thing, call it off. He could curl into the hard, unwelcoming cot and sleep for days and days and awake free of responsibility.

No, that would never do, his conscious would hunt him if no one else would. He would imagine Sian as himself as he took a dip over the cities edge and faded into infinite black. He sat at the edge of his bed, boots still holding in cramping arches and splashed lukewarm water over sunken eyes and jagged plains of cheekbone. Morwen can you hear me even from the pit of the planet?

........................

The door screeched as he goaded it open. How many times had he meant to oil the hinges? If Sian was asleep he would have awoken now. He slept so lightly these days unless Mara offered him aid with what drug he had on hand. How could he blame him? Whatever horror he had combatted would leave scars beyond the ones whitening over his bronze peel. The half-blood was useless in treating these inaccessible wounds, so he tended to avoid them.

He strode across the room, set down his things, and kept his back to his patient. "Good morning Sian." he began softly, the new day still gripping his vocal cords.

"How are you feeling? Did you sleep at all?" he confronted him, leaning along his counter. He always kept his distance. Sian ironically had never reached to strike him, unlike his sister. Still, unless the man was asleep or being treated there was a rift between them of cold floor. He kept a rift between most.

Mara's eyes fell to the floor and the pause caught them both in silence. They were both awaiting the results, holding their breath for his statement to slip. The tidings that he brought were variegated. If there was a fate that equaled death, these siblings had faced it. Finally his whisper bubbled up "I found her."

[Sian The]

The creak of the door seeped into Sian’s consciousness like rain water leaking through a crack in the roof during a violent storm. Inside his mind, there was peace, and comfort – a total absence of conscious thought, a state of repose brought about by intense concentration – the art of meditation. Several times a day, after many long minutes of prayer to Zintila, he would compose himself to clear his thoughts, and meditate. He was finding it was the only way to stay sane. In Lhavit, meditation had been taught to the Shinya acolytles as a means of improving their skills as guardians of the city. At first it had been a chore, one he had to work hard at to master. Then Sian had looked upon it as a welcome respite from the stress and strain of the day. Now, here in Kalinor, it was his sanctuary. It allowed him to ward off the fear, the uncertainty, the never ending plotting and planning and scheming that, because he had absolutely no knowledge of the city, he realized was all just so much brain fluff. Busy work, while his body lay broken and un-usable. It was vexing beyond enduring, almost – to have to lay inert and not have even the barest minimum of knowledge to plot some escape – should Jael even be here. So meditation had become his balm, his psychic medicine, his go to place to keep himself from doing something desperate and stupid and self-defeating. He had to rely on Mara. He had to. There was no other choice. Sian had been deep within his mind, focused on nothing, when Mara had entered. By stages, Sian’s brain allowed him to reawaken, his eyes opening to take in the now familiar sight of his benefactor. There didn’t seem to be anything clearly different about the healer, but Sian held his breath all the same. He knew that Mara had been to the Nest, finally. The healer had worked the system to get permission, and now . . Now he was returned. But with what news? Sian waited patiently. He waitied before answering the questions that were not perfunctory but which he sensed were simply an opening – or an evasion. Then those three words slipped from Dra-Marvasa’s lips, and Sian The let out his inheld breath with a great whoosh – a gasp of excitement, joy, and dread. They always exercised caution, when they spoke. They were always alone – no other healer cared about the fate of the refugee traveler. But that might not always be the case. In a hushed voice, Sian repeated the words, rapturously. “You found her. Dra-Maravasa . . . “ The question stuck in his throat at the last second. He cleared it and forced his voice to remain steady. “How – how is she? Is she . . . is she . . . alright?“ His dark eyes sought the truth in the healer’s crimson orbs. “Is she with child?”

[Mara]

He negated to meet the poignant rusty circlets, his eyes nestled into the creases of dusty foundation. The dim light lobbed deceiving panes of shadow across his face, and for a moment their bitter silence smelled of despair, a hopeless odor of copper and salt. "No, she has not been impregnated, yet." The pitch of his unforgiving contemplations reverberated what his hidden expression could not audibly croak. The ‘yet’ was the demise of any pleasant bearings, it drew the inevitable to the surface, that though they had found her, it was only a matter of time. How long could her young fertile body fight the infection of a Widow Child?

He shifted, weight bouncing from one heel to the other. "It will be problematic, more than I had initially thought." Mara wandered between the idle torso of his patient to the light seeping under the doors crack, a source of agitation to the bleak room. Carried toward the edges of the room, he began to screw the cold surface of opalgloams in their holds, the adjustment plucked sparse light more graciously throughout the room. A luminosity resembling the face of a moon kissed night, but never quite as glorious in its delivery.

"She has resisted, since she first arrived evidently. As much as a comfort as this may seem, this only means they have initiated alternative methods to subdue her." His fingers tweaked the scrunching sweep along the bridge of his nose. "They are keeping her drugged." it was a pitiful and hasty admittance that retched past incensed whitened blades. "Once I discovered that, I had to find a medical excuse to see her. The Nest is not a place in which they spare any precautions."

"She was not exactly thrilled to see me. She is a strong woman, she fought our conversation every step of the way." on instinct his palm gently stroked the purpling wound along his temple, a stifled flinch stiffened and caused him to just as quickly leave it be. "Eventually she heard me out. She told me to tell you-" his eyes finally locked with Sian's "That she is ready."

“That only leaves, the ‘How?’” he shook his head, “How to keep her from becoming impregnated and how to get you both out of here.”

“I can continue to monitor her, but I’m unsure how long my excuses will go unchecked, or how long until-“he shied away from Sian again, the bite of what was obviously needed to be stated hung over them “Until she truly is with child.”

[Sian The]

Could he breathe? Would he suffocate – asphyxiate on his own relief – and fear. It was the best possible news, and the worst. Jael was here. After long months of not know, of only guessing, hoping – dreading – he now knew, positively. She was within reach. She was not pregnant. Not yet. But she would be, eventually, unless they acted. She had quickly become pregnant with Jiu, after her wedding day. There wasn’t any reason to think she was unfertile. She was here – in this accursed place. And totally vulnerable. Totally at the mercy of the Widows – and only her now severely handicapped brother and this half-blood stranger to ward off death. Sian heard the same thoughts underscoring Mara’s voice. The pessimism. The certainty that his sister would be sentenced to death, if they did not act – very, very soon. And how exactly were they to do that? Sian listened to each word that Mara gave him, hungry to know just how desperate their challenge would be. He tried to take it all in, analyze each sentence, each new revelation, as soon as it entered his brain. Jael had resisted. Jael was being drugged. Jael had rejected even Mara’s intervention. Sian’s eyes took in the gesture – how the healer touched the freshly bruised skin of his temple – and he guessed that was what Mara meant by his description – she fought our conversation every step of the way. Apparently so. And – she was ready. Of course, would she not be? He knew Jael – knew her inside and out and upside down and sideways – better even than Hallec had known her, perhaps. Sian knew how hard it would be for his sister to admit her fear, her terror, her despair. In those few words, she was telling him all these things. I’m ready. Get me the hell out of here. Take me home, Sian. Please. Take me back to my son. Don’t wait. Don’t wait until it’s too late. Whatever it takes, whatever the risks, I will try, for I can not stay here to simply die and abandon Jiu. Come get me and take me away from this horrible place of death. “That only leaves, the ‘How?’ How to keep her from becoming impregnated and how to get you both out of here.” Dra-Marvasa’s question hung in the air, an invisible wall between Sian and his sister, and freedom, escape – life. A very excellent question indeed. One which Sian, during countless hours of enforced inactivity, had turned over and over and over again in his mind. One to which, he had formulated a somewhat vague, amorphous answer. An answer which had seemed . . . ridiculous. Untenable. Undoable. A solution to this problem that encompassed the very life of his sister, but yet, which he had rejected time and time again. Until now. Those many times the idea had washed about in his anxiety soaked brain, he had discarded it. It was a course of action he could never propound to the healer, never ask of this stranger who had done so much already, for no reason other than then pricking of his own heart. It was a path which he was sure his sister would find abhorrent as well, if indeed she was here, spirited away by the Widows, to be impregnated and then die giving birth. So, yes, this idea would come with its own staggering flood of revulsion, to both parties, he was sure. But . . . each time he had taken the idea out to examine it from every angle, over and over, looking for some permutation that would make it more palatable, and each time he had finally shoved it back in some dark hole, those times, he had not know for sure, if Jael was even here. Why crystallize a repugnant plan when it might not even have a chance at genesis? But now . . . Now . . . Sian looked at Dra-Marvasa with an intensity that could not go unnoted, a deep fire of furious resolve burning in the depths of his dark eyes. It was unthinkable. But not only would they think it – they must somehow accomplish it as well. It must be. Otherwise . . . “Then we must act, so that my sister’s efforts will not have been in vein. But I can not.” His hands spread out, his palms turned upwards over his poor, shattered body, an eloquent gesture of his state of incapacity. “You know I can not hope to even walk yet, let alone wield a weapon. We must protect my sister, in the only way possible, until I am healed enough to get her out of here.” Sian was looking at Mara with the most direct, forthright, unwavering, unshrinking gaze he could muster. “You must get her pregnant, Dra-Marvasa. You are only half a Widow. Your child would not kill her.” He paused a moment, knowing what kind of reaction his plan would elicit from the unlucky healer who had the misfortune to ever stumble across this unwanted charge. He could acknowledge this. “I know you would not wish it to be so but . . . you are her only hope.”

[Mara]

"W-what?!" the half-blood's cask of blossoming pigment sloshed with the ambiguity that buzzed in the particles of the appeal still bustling about his lobes. His head pitched from one side to the other in torment, more vigorously than his habitual dismissal. His fists balled against his thighs. "You do not know what you are asking of me." his tone had sunk and diminished with a whistle of air between his clenched teeth. “If you did you would not ask it.”

It was outrageous. Bile fizzed up his trachea to be suppressed with a hard swallow and a grimace. How could he request this of him? This Lhavitian seemed more a stranger now than he had remembered him on his arrival if only in the wake of such an emboldened proclamation. "You must get her pregnant, Dra-Marvasa." No! He was exposing what little he had constructed in this underground bastion to the masses, making himself a traitor, to escape the same selfish depravities Sian was asking him to commit. Mara had no knowledge what his child could do to a woman, what stress it would put on Jael's destabilized physique.

He had beheld the expressions of the surrogates, the endless look of famished dread, as a Widow sapped the pink from their faces. He had not read what a male half-blood Symenestra's child would be like. There was no assured certainty the result would be any better than if his blood was full of Kalinor's destructive prowess. He never had any aspiration to find out.

Rising from his seat, the medic spun just before the eggshell washed wall. The desperate necessity of a snowy window ledge was stronger than it had been moments ago. There were not many times when he allowed himself to wander home, to long for it and what modest riches lay hidden in the sheets collapsing snow.

A glance was given to his right hand, where his fingers scrubbed at the silk thread of ink lain beneath the outer layer of his skin. Its delicate helices and stalks were lifted to his shuddering mouth and taken between his fangs with a mild tweak. The most questionable puncture of guilt stabbed against his hallow-feeling trunk and built a ball of mud in his throat that nearly choked him. Affection had become a haunting and he had found his refuge at last in solitude, something a Skyglow would certainly not approve of. He would have smirked had the pain been swallowed down at the thought.

"I cannot." his head shook again, eyes slamming shut between the tight ridges of eyelid. "Besides the utter improbability and the deception it would take to pull off such an exploit; Jael would never go along with it and I will not endeavor to convert her either! No, not to gamble on a supposition and lay with a being she despises and...bear a child she never desired...would never love." a painful growl rumbled deep in his throat.

"There has to be something else, some other way."

[Sian The]

Of course, the idea was wholly repellant to the healer. Sian The knew it would be. In a way, he was counting on that very same ethnocentric loathing of his own race’s practices to prompt Mara to assist him in getting Jael out of this hellish place. To ask him to participate in such a scheme was outrageous, in the extreme. But ask it Sian would – even to the point of trying to force the idea down Mara’s throat, figuratively, if he could. He was desperate, and this seemed the only way – unless Mara had thought of some way that they could act immediately and spirit Jael away from under the noses of the watchful widows even despite the fact that Sian could barely move, let alone walk, or fight. He saw the revulsion in Dra-Marvasa’s expression, heard it in his voice. He let Mara give his denials and refusals and when the healer was quiet with the improbability – the impossibility – of what Sian asked, he finally spoke, again in a somber, deadpan tone. “You do not know my sister, Dra-Marvasa. But I do. If you offer her even the most infinitesimally small sliver of hope, that she could survive this and return to her son, she will do it. Giver me paper and pen and I will write to her. She will know this comes from my mind, my heart. She will accept it. Perhaps not happily. But she will. I will tell her to treat you with the utmost care, for, truly – you are our only hope. Three lives – all that is left of my family – rest with you, Mara. And I know this too about my sister. If you father a child on her, she will love it, for she can not do otherwise. My sister has a loving heart – one as big as the sky, though she might not have showed it to you. Why would she? But she would never not love her own child. She simply would not have that capacity for acrimony. If this child you might create between the two of you brought her alive and whole back to her son, then she would love and treasure it all the more for that very fact.” He paused. It was the most that he had spoken in one breath since his arrival in Kalinor. But he could not help but add, with a much more pleading tone, “I know I ask the unthinkable, Mara, but not the undoable. Right or wrong, it doesn’t matter. In the time it takes for me to heal enough to hope to be able to get my sister out of here, she will be pregnant. Please – let it be your child. Give her that chance.”