Under the canvas of night, the seamstress and the young rogue sought out the pack-beast huddled in the furthest corner of Darkenhold's stables. This was familiar hay; this was a familiar home. They brought dried apples with them, a treat for the black lips of the blind and battered beast. Once chewed for the toothless creature, the mealy hearts of the apples were stuffed with pinches of herbs.
Soon, Caliir slept. He did not feel the dwarven knife parting the bulging skin of his inner left flank. Fat droplets of blood ran down through his hair and gleamed like rubies against the candlelight.
"Here," Gloria Wynsee told Cat as skirts wiped the glass clean.
* * * *
Under her hand when next she awakened, Noura the wildling would find the smoothly-blown glass of an azure bottle resting just below her fingertips. The mouth was still stoppered. Old blood flecked the edges of the cork. Wrapped around the bottle was a note, written with extreme care from a hand that had relearned each and every letter.
I regret this. But these fealings do not matter. Though I must live without my hand, I ought not forse you to live without a limb you feel you require. I am human and I am imperfect. I am subject to the demons of my poor desisions. I too would like to live my life knowing I am loved. A part of me which pitys herself once believed that for those three times she saved you from death -- from the lake, from the wolf, from your cave -- that she might one day hear a thank you. This is a sentiment I wished for not due to the nature of its gratitude, but that the eyes behind that voice might say to me I love you as well Gloria.
But I realize my mathy-matics are off; I have analyzed this formula through the wrong lens.
In every circumstance, you wished for death. Your resentment for me grows each time I deny you that freedom.
I apologise now as I have apologised a thousand times, for I cannot help but resent a girl who chooses not to live.
So here is your finest friend. She is not human. She will not let you down. She will not function at the whims of an intemperate collection of feelings. She will make you whole again. She will lure you with whatever comforts you desire. But she will not care for you enough to turn herself into a fool.
A child will not bring me new happiness. It will not grant me fresh insight. It will not make me any less stupid. But it will not make me less human. And should I die when this child comes to be born, as many women do, I wish to die human: fallible, frightened, and forgotten.