Osh makes a promise

There were girls inside – at least two – but nowhere in their panicked gabbling was the low voice that Osh’s ears had strained all night to hear.

His mind flocked with excuses as he jogged up to the cottage: he had taken the wrong path – it was the wrong house – she was sleeping – she had been taken to the castle – Vash had come before him and already taken her home.

The woman waited just until he tried to peek inside before throwing open the door, perhaps in a futile attempt to break his nose.

“What do you want?”

“Please, are you house of Ffraid?”

The woman’s sour expression flared into wide-​​eyed shock, like the flame of a lantern when the glass is lifted away.

“An elf!” she gasped. Then she flicked her hands at the sky and boldly slashed a cross before his face with her finger. “Elf!”

Osh had been greeted in so many strange manners that morning that by now he was only frustrated to be wasting time.

“Please – ”

“Aelfie!” the woman called back to the frantic young ladies that flocked the house. “Take them kids out the back and run for their Da!”

Osh begged, “Please, I only try to find my girl – ”

“We don’t got nothing to do with your kind out here!”

“Please – Kraaia, blonde and small! Did you find?”

“We hain’t seen no girls with ears like yours!”

“Please!” Osh sobbed. “I explain – she is not my daughter – ”

Then, inside the house, amid the whispered squeaks, the panicked scuffling, and the ragged wails of a baby bounced heedlessly around, Osh heard a little voice call out his name – “Osh!” – weak and hoarse and distant like the mew of a half-​​drowned kitten crying up from the depths of a well.

He gasped a hasty, “Sorry!” and shoved his way through the door.

He moved almost faster than he could see. He scarcely glimpsed the ghastly little head before it was on his shoulder – he only saw that her swollen eyes were staring straight into his own.

“Kraaia!”

He dared not lift her up, so he dropped his hip onto the edge of the mattress and pulled her close to rock her like a baby where she sat. Like a baby she squeaked and blubbered incoherently into his collar, until with his murmured nonsense she had quieted into gasping sobs.

He held her as gently as any baby, mindful of her weak neck and delicate limbs, but this baby proved herself big enough to wrap her arms around his back and squeeze him: the first hug he and she had ever shared.

But though she held him tightly with her arms, he felt no hands clasping him, no fingers gripping his cloak or digging into the muscles of his back. Her arms might have ended at her wrists.

“Watch her legs!” the woman Ffraid hollered as she sent the other girls scrambling out the back door. “She broke one!”

Osh whispered, “Kraaia!” and tried to clutch her closer, but Kraaia twisted her shoulders and drew back her head.

She cried hoarsely, “Osh!” – the very sound his ears had been straining all night to hear. He grit his teeth and hardened the air in his lungs just in time to stop a sob.

Her cheek was dry and hot against his forehead. Her swollen lips scratched his temple. Beneath the rumpled blankets he felt the dragging dead weight of her broken leg.

At some dark hour of the night, when Osh had been torturing himself with images of Kraaia lying face-​​down in the snow, hurt and frightened and alone and calling out for him… she truly had been lying face-​​down in the snow, hurt and frightened and alone and calling out for him.

“I ran away!” she croaked. Her breath was thick with the odor of cheap wine and medicinal herbs.

Osh was startled into a choking laugh. “I know!”

“I p’omised I woul’n’t!”

“Ah, dídíla, it does not matter!” he whispered.

“I di’n’t do it, Osh!”

Her words were muddled by her cracked lips and slurred by her drunken tongue. Osh did not believe he had understood, but before he could ask, the woman Ffraid stomped back to confront him in her empty house.

“Do you know this creature?” she asked Kraaia. “Is he hurting you?”

Kraaia ignored her. “Is she dead?” she lisped breathlessly up into Osh’s face.

Osh had not forgotten about Lena, but during the night that tragedy had shrunk to a portable size: small enough that he could pinch it between his finger and thumb and tuck it away until he had found Kraaia. Now it was unfurling.

“Yes, Kraaia,” he whispered. “Lena is dead.”

Her swollen eyelids fell closed, and her swaying head sank. Her hair fell away from her ear, revealing a gruesome dark blister atop its arch. In a dream Osh might have believed it a bud that would one day bloom into an elfin point. Awake, however, he knew it for the first cankerous signs of flesh that would eventually fall away.

He whimpered, “Kraaia…” She seemed to be slipping. He wanted her to look into his eyes again.

“I already knew it,” she mumbled confusedly. “‘Cause Benedic’ was scweaming and scweaming till he just stopp’, and then I knew.”

“Kraaia…”

“D’you think he felt it when she died?”

She looked up at him then, and Osh was paralyzed, remembering how his own children had screamed and screamed. His own mother had died in utter peace, and still he had felt the blessed earth melting away beneath his feet, and had cried and cried.

“Yes, I think,” he admitted. “However, Kraaia, he was not alone – ”

“I di’n’t do it, Osh! I swear to God! Don’t let ‘em hang me!”

Osh gasped, “Kraaia!” It seemed he had understood the first time.

“I’d never – ” Her healthy-​​looking pink tongue came out to lick and prod at her scaly lips, tasting their strangeness, or trying vainly to soften them.

“What are you doing to her?” Ffraid demanded anxiously. “She’s just waking up now!”

“I’d never hurt her!” Kraaia croaked. “Maire did it! She was my friend! And I told her so!”

She tried to screw up her face into her customary look of defiance, but her numb lips only pouted out together, and her cheeks were too puffy to be wrinkled, and her swollen eyelids already made squinting slits of her eyes. She looked like a baby that had been left alone to cry and cry.

Osh pleaded with her, “Kraaia! Nobody believes you did it! Kraaia!”

“Those grooms b’lieved it!” she blubbered. “‘n the guards! ‘n ever’body always said I’d burn the house down someday!”

Osh groaned, “No!”

“And ’cause I stabbed Vash!”

“No, Kraaia!”

He tried to lay his hand on her shaking shoulder, but at the brush of his fingers her oversized linen shift slipped down her arm, and his hand closed over her bare skin.

Ffraid grabbed the sleeve of his cloak from behind and yanked his hand away. Osh turned his face aside almost faster than he could see – but he saw. Her long, frail collarbone. The shadowy ridges of her ribs. The brown bud of one tiny breast.

“Let go of her, you animal!” Ffraid snarled, whipping at his sleeve with her bare hand. “She’s but a girl!”

“He’s not an animal!” Kraaia sobbed with a voice so hoarse it was painful to hear. “He’s a Christian elf! And he’s my friend!”

She tried to pull up her shift, but her stiff fingers moved clumsily together like a baby’s grasping fist. Her eyes widened, and she stared down at her own hand as though she did not recognize it as hers.

Her inflamed knuckles were as red as raw flesh, and the skin around her nails puffed out in dozens of blisters. Osh knew that over the coming days they would ooze together until her dying fingers floated in a glove of her own dead skin. Even Ffraid fell reverently silent beside him, overawed by this tragedy.

Kraaia must not have known, or childlike she must have still believed he could solve any problem. She held out her hand to him and whimpered fearfully, “Osh!”

It was the sound he had been listening for all night. She had been crying and crying for him, and he had not heard.

With one hand he gently clasped her wrist and pushed her arm aside. With the other he pulled her shift cozily up over her shoulder, and brushed back her hair, and laid her down.

She sniffed and snuggled into the pillow as he pulled the rough blankets up around her, making him suspect she had once known what it was to be tucked in by loving hands.

“Now, Kraaia, I think you have still some sleep left in you. Here is what to do. I shall stay and sit by you until you sleep, and then you shall sleep all today, hard as you can. And next thing you know, I will wake you and say, ‘Here is my friend whom I would like you to meet.’ And my friend will say, ‘Ah! But I cannot kiss her hand until I make it better.’ And it is what he will do.”

“Shus?” she asked hopefully.

“Shus, or some other friend,” he assured her.

Osh did not know whether he would find Shosudin – or even whether Shosudin would want to come – but someone would come. He would find his sister if he had to, and tie her arms behind her back and throw her over his saddle if he had to. If he had to, he would go to Sorin.

He stood and said to Ffraid in his low lord’s voice, “I come back later with another elf.”

By now Ffraid had nothing to say.

“Osh?” Kraaia whispered from the bed.

Osh leaned down to blanket-​​tucking height again. “Yes, Kraaia?”

“I’m sorry I broke my p’omise,” she mumbled groggily.

Osh stroked her body beneath the blankets, from shoulder to hip in one direction, like a sleeping cat.

“That does not matter,” he murmured. “It was not a good promise, because I did not think how sometimes we can be so afraid, we must run away in spite of promises. So here is a better promise: Promise to not run away, but if you must run away, promise to run away to me.”

Her body rocked slightly as he stroked her, but he saw her nod. Her eyes looked into his from deeps to deeps – from her blue abyss into his farthest reaches of sky.

“And for my promise,” he whispered, “I promise to believe you always, and to protect you from any person who does not believe you.”

She nodded again conclusively and closed her eyes.

Her body relaxed beneath his caresses, and her tense, shivering limbs unfurled, but her frostbitten hand lay darkening and clawlike beside her head, looking already more dead than alive.