Chapter Eighty (Patreon)

The kobold female’s once-golden fur was brittle and matted. She lay on a bed of jejing, as if she was already dead and her body was being prepared for burning. Perhaps the kobolds hoped that the cleansing moss would clean out the contagion or contamination within her, or perhaps it was simply that this was the only moss they could find that wasn’t infected by fulan. Besides its soothing scent and ability to reduce inflammation in infected wounds, jejing was resistant to most things that damaged plants, which was part of why it was considered to have purifying powers.

The condition of the Redmane’s chief wasn’t what Kaz found so shocking, though. No, it was the fact that she really was bound. Not just bound, but tied up so thoroughly that Kaz doubted she could do more than roll over by herself. Her torso was lost in so many layers of leather that Kaz couldn’t even tell if her arms were in front or behind her.

Ropes made from multiple long strips of leather woven together held everything in place, and the whole thing was repeated on her legs, covering them from thigh to ankle. Most disquieting of all was the metal rod placed behind her back teeth, keeping her mouth open just enough so she couldn’t bite or speak clearly, but it wouldn’t block breathing, drinking, or eating soft foods. This was held in place by still more leather strips.

Kaz swallowed hard as he stared at her, his legs feeling weak for an entirely different reason. He had never seen anything so horrible, and somehow the knowledge that this was being done to her out of love made it even worse.

“I know,” Lianhua said softly from behind him.

Kaz turned, seeing the glowing rune resting in her palm, and recognizing it as the one that blurred voices. He knew he shouldn’t be able to tell she was doing anything, much less know exactly what it was, but in that moment it was very hard to force himself not to react.

“Why,” he finally managed, then had to clear his throat and try again. “Why don’t they just kill her? It would be… better. Than this.”

Lianhua shook her head, circling around him to kneel down beside the sleeping kobold. Kaz could see one of her teacups on the stone beside her, and he wondered how long she had been there before he and the other males arrived.

“Someone hopes she’ll get better,” Lianhua said, her empty hand moving restlessly in her lap. “They can’t bear to let her go, and they can’t allow her to be free, and so here she lies, until death releases her.” Her voice held more sorrow than seemed appropriate for a human talking about a strange kobold, and her eyes seemed to be looking past the female actually lying there.

Kaz took a cautious step forward, then another. The ceiling was low enough that the fur on top of his head brushed it, and he shuddered at the sensation of something touching him when he wasn’t expecting it. He bent his head, then took one more cautious step and sat beside and slightly behind Lianhua.

The two of them sat in silence, watching the female. Her nostrils flared with each breath, but other than that and the roil of ki in her belly, Kaz couldn’t have been certain she was still alive. Her chest was hidden within so many layers of binding that he couldn’t even see it rise and fall.

“Should we-” Kaz finally said, and Lianhua jerked as if he’d woken her from sleep or meditation. She hadn’t been meditating, though, since she wasn’t pulling on his ki.

“What?” she asked, with unaccustomed ferocity. “Take it on ourselves to do what no one else has the strength or conviction to do? Smother her in her sleep? Cut her throat?”

“Let her rest,” Kaz said, staring at her, and she stared back as Kaz’s heart pounded in his chest and one single tear trickled from her eye, passing unnoticed over her pale cheek.

“Let her rest,” Lianhua laughed bitterly. Her fingers nearly closed around the rune she held, but she forced them flat again. “And how do you mean that? Let her sleep? Let her die? Let her pass, all but forgotten, from a world where no one cares about her except for one person who happens to hold enough power to keep her here, whether she would wish it or not?”

Kaz drew in a breath, and Li trembled against his neck, sensing the emotions that were pouring out of the usually gentle female, and utterly unable to understand them.

“What are you talking about, Lianhua?” Kaz asked.

Lianhua’s face twisted, and then she was crying, truly crying, though it was different from the way a kobold usually cried. Instead of whimpers and howls, her body shook with deep, racking sobs, and more tears poured down her face, flowing into her mouth and down her throat, vanishing beneath the collar of her white robe.

She cried for a long time, and Kaz sat and watched, with no idea what he should do. Any kobold other than a pup would be embarrassed to allow anyone else to see them break down like this, so he thought he should leave, but somehow, he also thought that she didn’t want to be alone, and even if he couldn’t help her, he should stay.

After a while, he edged forward, once, and then again. He didn’t touch her, quite, but he also wasn’t far away. He could feel the warmth of her leg on his knee, and he set his hand on the stone between them. Still, he was taken completely by surprise when she wrapped her arms around him and began to sob into his fur, completely ignoring the dirt and debris that was probably already there. Li clicked grumpily when the human’s arms touched her, but she didn’t pull away, and she didn’t bite.

It wasn’t too long after that when Lianhua finally managed to slow, and finally stop, the worst of her tears. She still hiccupped and took an occasional deep, shuddering breath, but she managed. When she pulled back, her face was puffy, red, and covered in Kaz’s newly gray fur, and when she scrubbed at her eyes with her sleeve, she only made it worse.

Kaz reached out and touched the pouch at her belt. “I would get you a handkerchief, but I don’t know how.”

Lianhua managed a little laugh, though she couldn’t quite meet his eyes. The fingers of the hand not holding the rune dipped into her pouch, and Kaz was silently impressed that she had somehow managed to not only remember she held the word, but that she had also maintained the flow of ki to it. In her position, he doubted he could have done as well, and Li probably would have had to take over for him.

Dabbing at her eyes with a dark green handkerchief, Lianhua sniffed, and Kaz almost laughed. She was trying to recover her dignity, but the mixture of tears, fur, and other things on her face wouldn’t allow it.

Reaching out, Kaz almost took the handkerchief from her, but stopped at the last moment. With a bemused hiccup, she handed it to him. If she was a puppy, he probably would have just licked her clean, but that wasn’t what adults did, and he’d never seen one of the humans lick themselves or anyone else, so he was almost certain that wouldn’t be right, anyway.

When Lianhua’s face was as clean as he could get it, he handed the handkerchief back. Her skin was still unpleasantly blotchy and shiny, which reminded him of the feeling of mild repulsion he’d gotten at first each time he looked into one of the human’s flat, hairless faces. He was used to them by now, but seeing the bare skin still made him think they were just wrong somehow.

Kaz didn’t ask what had caused Lianhua’s eruption, but after a little while, she began to speak anyway.

“When I was ten, my power began to show. I had always been able to sense when someone was particularly powerful, but people assumed I reacted because I was a child, and they were frightening adults, but then someone gifted my father a pair of hunting wolves, and one of them had a core. I could sense that it was different, and I mentioned it to my older brother, who told some of his friends, who told their parents. Somehow, someone put it together with the fact that the ability to sense ki sometimes appears in the Long clan, and within a month, someone attempted to abduct me. The kidnapper was stopped, but they killed themselves before they could be forced to say who hired them, and after that it happened over and over again.”

She sighed, rubbing at her eyes like a tired puppy. “Finally, my mother wrote to my grandfather, and he stepped in. He just… showed up, one day. I had never even met him before, but he said I was going to come live with him, and he would adopt me back into the Long clan. My father was already working to turn the abilities I would someday have to his advantage, but I think even he was realizing that he couldn’t keep me safe, so even though he protested, it wasn’t as much as he could have. My mother was just so tired by then, I think she was just glad to turn her attention back to her other children and return to her peaceful life.”

Lianhua turned her hand over, so the soft glow of the rune in her palm highlighted the purple lotuses sewn onto her robe, though only to Kaz’s eyes. She traced another rune on the back, though she didn’t put ki into it, so Kaz couldn’t tell what it was.

“My grandmother became my mother. Like my grandfather, she rarely left the Long family estate, but unlike him, she embraced the role of parent. She was old, by then, probably older than a human without ki, though I’m not exactly sure how far she had advanced in her cultivation. Like me, she was more interested in soul cultivation than body, so she looked old, while my grandfather only showed hints of his age.”

She rubbed the back of her hand, cleaning off something that had never really been there to begin with.

“When I was sixteen, I told them I wanted to join a sect and become a traveling scholar. My grandfather told me I could marry and study all I wanted at home, but my grandmother told me I should do whatever I wanted, and grandfather would learn to live with it.” A sad smile touched her lips, and she met Kaz’s eyes briefly.

“She was the only one who could tell him what to do. He would ignore anyone else except the Emperor himself, and even the Emperor doesn’t dare order the leader of the Long clan lightly. So, I joined the Zhe sect, and I was happy there. I was able to study for hours every day, and Yingtao came with me, so I had a… friend. I sent letters home, but I only visited once in two years, because that one time my caravan was nearly wiped out when someone tried to kidnap me again. I was safe inside the Zhe compound, you see, but on the road-”

Lianhua sighed and shook her head. “My grandmother and I had a pair of enchanted books. I could write in it, and my words appeared in her book, and vice versa. I couldn’t see her, but I spoke to her nearly every day, telling her what I learned, and what I did that day. Over time, I wrote less, and she responded more slowly, but I didn’t think much of it until she just didn’t answer at all.”

She bowed her head, damp wisps falling from the complex style into which she arranged her long head-fur. “To my shame, it took more than a month before I started to worry. It took until the end of that quarter before I arranged to visit. I was already Tin body by then, and was nearing Foundation, so I wasn’t nearly as vulnerable as I had once been.”

Her eyes shifted to the female kobold. “When I arrived, I found her like this. Not exactly, but not far. She had become more and more frail, and she was afraid that she would die and leave my grandfather alone, so she pushed herself. I didn’t even know she was still trying to improve her refinement, but she was, and she broke something inside.”

Kaz felt his heart rate pick up. Hadn’t Lianhua said once that humans could form a core of their own?  “Her core?”

Lianhua shook her head again. “She was in mid-Core Formation, so her core wasn’t solid enough to break, though that’s certainly a risk for those trying to transition from Golden Core to Nascent Soul. I think Grandfather may be nearing that stage, but the old cultivators are reluctant to speak about their progress. No, she was trying to complete her transition from Tin to Rhodium Body, which grants at least another thousand years of life. She was too old, though, and past the time when her body could absorb that amount of ki, and some part of her mind failed to change. She ended up like this.”

Quiet returned, somehow heavier than it had been before, as both of them watched the bound kobold on her bed of moss.

“She would wake, sometimes,” Lianhua finally whispered, “but she didn’t know us. She was like a child. She wanted her mother and father, and when they didn’t come, she would be angry, but she was filled with ki, and she would break things and injure people. Each time, my Grandfather had to come and force her to sleep again, and it tore him up inside.”

She reached out, but didn’t touch the sleeping female. “It would have been kinder to stop feeding and caring for her body, but he couldn’t. So long as she was alive, he couldn’t bear to let even that last, damaged part of her go.”

“What happened?” Kaz murmured, hardly daring to speak, but desperately wanting to know.

“She’s still there,” Lianhua said, “At least as far as I know. Grandfather spends part of every day with her, just holding her hand. He still does the things he has to do as the elder of our family, but he doesn’t care about them the way he used to. He was never ambitious, but Grandmother loved to have parties, and now the house is silent. Many of the servants have quit or been let go, and almost no one comes to ask his advice any more.”

Kaz reached up and stroked Li’s neck, taking comfort from the feeling of the smooth, warm scales beneath his fingers. She allowed it, even leaning into his touch slightly, though he could tell that she didn’t really understand why he would be so upset over someone else’s story. He sent her a picture of himself, bound and silent on the bed of moss, and she returned instant, angry denial. He changed the image so it was her, lying limp and damaged, irrecoverable, with a blue kobold howling his sorrow beside her. This, too, she refuted, making the fallen dragon rise up and fly circles around the mournful Kaz-figure, but he could feel her thinking very hard about what he was trying to explain.

“You know this kobold isn’t-”

Lianhua turned on him, anger making her dull eyes blaze again. “Of course I do! It’s just…”

Her body, which had momentarily regained its usual energy, sank inward again. “I miss her. I miss Grandfather, and our house, and quiet days studying whatever had captured my interest. I miss Yingtao, and playing with Gao, and planning my future without ever worrying about what I was leaving behind.”

After waiting a moment to see if she would add anything more, Kaz nodded. “I miss my father. And Rega. And… Katri. When we lived in the Deep, we had a house, and even though I can barely remember it now, I know I missed it a lot when I was younger. I had aunts and uncles and cousins, too, and I played with them just like the pups of any other tribe. I had barely started learning to fight and gather when we left, and some of them stayed, while others went with us, though I still don’t know why. All of them except Aunt Rega died or were traded away, and I don’t even remember their faces or scents any more.”

He had managed to shake Lianhua out of her own feelings, and she watched him now, rather than the kobold on the bed of moss. Her eyes were regaining a bit of their spark, and he could see her usual curiosity rising as she probably thought of a dozen questions she’d like to ask.

“I think,” he went on, but slowly, “that we all have things we mourn, whether they’re people or places or something else entirely. I’m sorry yours are so painful, and that this moment is hard for you.”

That was it. He didn’t have anything to comfort her, or help her move on. All he could do was let her know he understood, at least a little, and that he was there.

She smiled. “Thank you, Kaz. That is,” her voice choked, “probably the kindest thing anyone has said to me in a very long time.”