#cara milbrae

[finlaygibbs]

The Dead Who Speak

Her body wasn’t warm, but neither was it empty.  He said as much to the dead woman’s father while the old man wrung his cap in his hands.  “We don’t know. We don’t know what happened,” he said, bewildered.  The lady of the house hadn’t even come downstairs, certainly not to meet the necromancer.

He’d left his uniform at the barracks, of course.  This wasn’t Vanguard business, this was mercy.  Finlay hadn’t been too pleased with the priest of Grenth in the city square calling him “brother.”  Finlay was no priest, and the priest was no him.  The details tugged at him, though:  a very young woman dead in her bed after illness, that was no strange thing.  The Vanguard hadn’t even been called for that.  But she’d been doing better, the father kept saying.  So much better than she’d been.

Finlay finally got the man’s remaining child to herd his father from the room. The living boy was too young to be called a man in full, but he guided the old man with a steady hand.  He’ll be a comfort, Finlay found himself thinking, and almost in the same breath wondered when he’d started thinking things that his own father would say.

By the time his focus returned to the dead girl, his power blazed in the intense green of his eyes.  “Hello, sweetheart,” he said to the spirit visible just to the left of the girl’s bed.  She looked down on herself with an unreadable expression. “Aren’t there enough dead Ascalonians who can’t go forward?” he asked her. “You don’t need to add another one to the pile.”

Her voice was no audible thing, and words barely formed themselves in the midst of so much sorrow.  Chances not taken, boys not kissed, children never born, never cherished.  Parents never guided into old age, friends never found. Dances, colors, places never seen.  What lovemaking might have been like. What beauty might have emerged from her long hours at her loom.

Names had power, and he spoke hers gently.  “Cara.”  The spirt twisted and saw him, solid and there, and the force of her regrets nearly rocked him backwards.  A brother she’d never see grow.  A mother who’d never recover, Cara knew it.  Her mother was sensitive.  She’d never come back from the loss. Finlay felt tears prickle in his own eyes.  Gods, his father was getting on, and time was a one-way path, and -- 

He raked his hand against the corner of the bed where a nail jutted from wood. The slick sudden pain of it drew him out of Cara’s anguish, grounded him again. Blood had power, his more than most, and he watched a slick, dark pool of it thread along the pale corpse’s swaddling.  He was no healer through blood; he took and he hurt, and that’s all he did.  But still, even he could sense something suddenly off near Cara’s abdomen and throat and mouth, a black miasma that crawled up her spirit’s arms and tethered her to this plane like rope.

Fuck.  Poison?  Bad food?  So much sorrow in her.  So much regret.  That someone loved would do this, someone she loved so much --

“Fuck,” he said aloud to go with the thought of seconds ago.  He raked his hands back through floppy curls and made his way out of the house with vague assurances of prayers to be made and procedures to be undertaken.  Damn and blast.  Time to find Keser.  The priest of Grenth’s little mercy errand seemed to be dark business after all.