Knights don’t fall, she reminds herself.
Ilde’s wrong in her saddle, too busy thinking about the hit to focus on the space between. As she positions her lance, she can feel the world around her just a touch too far away. She stares down her opponent’s shield, as though a strong glare will make up for a weak seat in the saddle.
She could angle her shield, go for a glancing blow. Dodge completely, and take the foul. Instead, she holds; braces for impact.
She braces for impact, and her vision s h a t t e r s .
•••
In a clearing that does not exist stands a god. Her god, she knows, although she’s never met them. She was born with their mark, and in her adolescence she had hated the spilled-wine stain that trickled from temple to breast. The mark of a healer.
All she’d ever wanted was to be a warrior.
“You look surprised, young Knight Ilde. You don’t need to be. I visit all my fallen chosen.”
She glares, because she cannot remember how she came to be here but she remembers enough to spot the untruth.
“Didn’t,” she says, but her sentence falls five words short of what she meant it to be.
“Didn’t you?” asks her god, and then pain makes her vision go white.
•••
She comes to, and she sees
she sees
Her vision throbs, pulses along with her heartbeat. There’s a constellation of pain across her body. She had dreamed of stars named after her once, but this isn’t that at all.
“You’re awake!”
Enise’s words are simple. But it’s like summer, back when they were blank pages. They’d race each other through the castle grounds, not aware enough to notice the stares, not cautious enough to care. They’d leave hard-won toffee in the sun to warm and eat it in hidden places they thought belonged to them.
Ilde feels the words, not quite solid, slipping through clumsy hands. What’s wrong with me? She wants to ask, but opens her mouth and all she hears is “W... w... wwwwwwwwww—”
She’d braced for impact, shattered like the lance across her visor, and now there was a splinter in her works, preventing a gear from turning.
“Don’t push yourself.” Enise’s voice floats by Ilde from somewhere far away. Bright like summer, before they’d been tall enough for full armour. The only two girls training to be knights in a sea of more traditional soldiers, learning how heavy chivalry can hang around the necks of those who are redefining it.
“Go back to sleep.”
Caught between memory and the ground, she dreams.
•••
Ilde dreams of her own pulse, a story told in idle fingers tapping out the tune of old bards’ songs and young wives’ tales.
The castle’s priests had looked at her birthmark and called her a healer.
She had earned each callus fighting that destiny.
Ilde had hoped for more out of her first tournament. A hero’s beginning for a half-way decent knight. But she didn’t even manage to leave the field conscious.
Brave, they’ll call her, as they shake their heads. Brave for all the wrong reasons.
Brave, like an insult.
Like a healer who refuses to learn the words for prayers of self-healing because she’s afraid they’ll take it too far, smooth out her skin, erase the scars she’s earned fair and square.
Brave, like a fool who takes a hit for no other reason than to defy expectations.
•••
“Once you’re on your feet, I can help you to the shrine,” Enise offers, shy in the way she only is around Ilde. She’s got a voice that booms, made for command, but she decided she was a woman and the king decided he would have no lady commanders.
Here, in this place of healing, Ilde has to strain to hear it.
“And you can ask your god to heal you, right?” She pauses, and Ilde burns. There should be no embarrassment in the casual reference to knowing each other’s bodies—knights both, women both, each defying what their bodies had planned for them. Why the thought is making her blush now, she’s not sure. “You’ve worn their mark your whole life. Surely they’ll listen.”
Ilde thinks back to lessons she dozed through, the rough diagrams of bodies that never looked like hers. She knows her muscles and bones by how they move under her skin, not by any artist’s attempt to capture them.
She wonders what the diagrams would say about her wounds, about the spaces left behind.
•••
They pull splinters out of her cheek and her scalp, taking hair and words with them. She uses twenty stuttering words and some convoluted metaphor to hide the fact that she’s forgotten the name of the thing one uses to cut food. Not that anyone can tell, because when she opens her mouth
when she opens her mouth,
there’s not enough there
It’s all slrrrrd sssnds and ab orted b eats, and she’s like the king’s new automaton, perfect façade hiding sawed-through strings. They could have at least used a sharper knife, made cleaner cuts, easier to sew up again—
Knife. Damn it.
•••
Ilde walks to the shrine, alone. She’s so busy congratulating herself for knowing the way that it’s not until she’s standing in front of the steps that she realizes she’s forgotten how to pray.
•••
Her first healing lessons came in her first year as a page, from a man who had been compressed by the weight of the world and his own part in carrying it. She was twelve years old with hands still too small to hold a full sword. He gave her an empty book and a brush dipped in ink that smelled like a sickbay and dictated each word for her to write.
“Every word is a step in a dance,” he explained. “When you dance just right, you open a path between this world and the next.”
“I see that look,” he had said, not waiting for her to ask. “Knights have to be clever-footed too, Ilde.”
His name was—
•••
She goes to her quarters, digs out that book, full of other people’s words. She should open it, begin to relearn them. She should.
She burns it instead. The fire burns bright, hungry.
Ilde is hungry too.
What will it take to heal? she writes with the ashes across the walls of her room. What do you call a broken knight?
Her quarters are a shrine of her own making, and in the daylight, her fingers have gone as burgundy as her godmark.
She doesn’t have answers, but the questions come easier now. She writes down each one.
•••
“What do I call you?” She asks her god, when they visit her again.
“Wh… Why do you sssstare?” She asks Enise, when she catches the other woman at it.
“Your people have never named me,” they say. “It’s not in the script.”
“I’m not sure,” Enise admits. “It’s hard—not to stare at you.”
“I want to try,” admits Ilde.
“Well, I’m f…f…” Ilde says. A growl of frustration replaces the word.
Her god smiles. “Go on, then.”
“I’ll go then.” Enise passes her,
hesitating like she’s waiting for Ilde to stumble.
Ilde wakes up with complete sentences on her lips.
They’re gone by that afternoon.
Ilde locks her knees. Doesn’t let herself think about how maybe it’s not the falling Enise
watches for, but the chance to catch her.
Doesn’t let herself think about how she’ll miss those eyes, when they’re not on her.
•••
“What’s that prayer? I don’t think they’ve taught me that one yet,” says one of the warrior healers, watching her mutter over her morning meal. She used to hate how they shared a mess hall, the knights and the healers. People would assume they knew her role at a glance, regardless of the knight’s heraldry she wore.
She prays. The words are different every morning, not because she doesn’t know them, but because she is learning all the different ways they can be said. Sometimes the lines are recognizable, sometimes they are stuttered and incomplete, but her lungs fill just the same, and every day the pain lessens.
Ilde thought healing would make her feel weaker, smooth out her imperfections until she couldn’t tell apart her own face from that of her fellow knights. But her helm still whistles when she wears it, shaped by a hit she shouldn’t have taken. Her shield has been hammered back into shape with hands that hardly shook. And the face in the mirror feels more and more like her own.
“I wr…wr…wrote it myself,” she says. She doesn’t know if their disbelief comes from the concept itself or her halting delivery, but she doesn’t care, because she asks questions of a god whose name only she knows, and they answer, and that is something; that is something too big to put into words and yet, she does anyway.
She doesn’t mind the mess arrangements anymore. With how new scars define the lines of her like armour, no one mistakes her for anything other than a knight.
•••
When Ilde was young and still shy behind the sword, she dreamt of being a legend, of walking in the footsteps of the heroes that had come before her. But none of her heroes got to choose how their stories were told—their stories were all written down by others.
She doesn’t want to be like them anymore.
•••
Ilde dips her hands into the ashes, and the coals still glow, but her hands don’t blister. She still pours words like molten metal into the holes in her vocabulary, still stutters on simple subjects, still holds her ground when she should, perhaps, give. But now, it’s to carve out her own space. Less the echo, more the explosion.
She braces for impact, and like good steel, she bends but does not break.
•••
“I know your name now,” she tells her god.
They talk like this often, somewhere between awake and dreaming, between endings and beginnings. Her words come so much easier, in this in-between. She never remembers the steps, but they always forgive her stumbles, help her back to her feet when she asks, and wait for her when she doesn’t.
“Oh?” says her god, because they already know. “Will you tell the rest, then? Become a prophet?”
Ilde shakes her head, likes how the light catches her scars when she does so. They are a constellation she won’t find mirrored in the sky, but maybe she’ll name it one day anyway.
“I think I’ll let them choose their own names for you. And words. It’s what you wanted, right?”
“More than anything,” agrees her god, who looks a little lighter than they had when they first met. “Ilde, you don’t know how long I have been waiting to have a simple conversation.”
Ilde thinks of impacts, of how long a fall can take if one doesn’t know how to get back up.
She looks at them, and she sees
she sees
•••
“You’re still staring,” Ilde says, and Enise starts. Ilde can’t see the girl’s blush against her dark complexion, but she can feel the heat.
“I was hoping you’d notice,” she admits, and Ilde has realized that one of Elise’s eyes is a brighter brown than the other. Another godmark—one for those who can feel the ebb and flow of emotions like a sailor feels the tides.
“I know why I stare, now,” Enise says, like it’s a confession. Then she whispers a prayer to share her godmark’s power for a moment, and Ilde feels the emotions too, and realizes that’s exactly what it is.
If Ilde were outside of her own body, she would see the moment when she bends. Not from defeat, but toward a shared secret. Like toffee in the summer. She has rebuilt this body with her own hands, and so when she reaches forward to cup scarred face between scarred palms, she does so laid bare. Unafraid.
And when Enise mirrors her, she understands how hard Enise has to work to make her rough hands this gentle.
Their first kiss is the softest thing either of them have ever built, and it is beautiful. She sees stars, and falls into the sky—deep like water, with hands that feel like home.
•••
There once was a great healer and knight, say the legends.
One day her head split open, and all sorts of things spilled out. Sometimes, that is the end of a story. But she began,
and began,
and beganbeginbegan.
She told her own story, the words a little different each time.
She was brave like a fool—sometimes spoke too much to say too little. She bent where other heroes might brace and break; befriended the one she was supposed to worship; asked questions where others might demand answers, and that made her great.
She was happy, and she knew love and love knew her, and that made her great, too.
