voiceless

She’d taken to calling him Fortune. Only in her own head, though—out loud and to everyone else, he was t’hiat. The guest. But she couldn’t help but think him fortunate; what else was it to survive the shattering of both his horns?

Aspiration ducked into the healer’s tent, a wooden tray of food in her hands. Shellfiend soup and roasted grubs; sliced purple yams and small yellow plums; ashnuts and smoked fish and her grandmother’s best flatbread. “Won’t get well if he doesn’t eat,” the old woman told her, piling plates and bowls high. “You see to it he eats.” And so she had, for all the good it did. Most days she came back with the tray untouched.

He was dozing at present, or something like it. Sprawled on the sleeping mat, a pile of blankets half-on, half-off his tall, emaciated form. The healer said his temperature wouldn’t settle, dragging him wildly between chills and fever, and nothing so far could steady it. Intuition was doing what she could, she and her apprentice both, but they’d never dealt with a shattered infernii before. All the stories said victims of such assault rarely survived, and if they did, they were forever altered—and such altering often stole their lives in the end.

Aspiration made her steps loud over the woven mats that made up the floor of the tent. Fortune panicked at the slightest thing—screamed himself out of sleep more often than not—and it was best, she’d found, not to creep up on him, even accidentally. “Hello again,” she said, kneeling beside him. “I brought you something to eat.”

He stirred, bleary cyan eyes struggling to focus on her. It took some minutes, but he got himself upright, though sweat shone on his face and chest at the effort. Such wounds he bore there; a starburst of punctures scattered between collarbone and navel. Shrapnel, Intuition said. She’d taken out most of whatever it was that had exploded into him, but some fragments were too deep to get. Whether they would fester and poison him remained to be seen.

Aspiration set her tray down and held her hands up where he could see. “How are you feeling?” she asked, signing slowly as she spoke. The shattering had taken his voice and it had yet to return; if indeed it ever would. He hadn’t seemed to recognise any handsigns so she’d been teaching him, or trying to.

He didn’t sign anything back to her. His throat worked, muscles standing out tense as he fought to form words.

“Don’t,” Aspiration said. She lifted the bowl of soup and held it out until he took it. “Just eat.”

A strangled noise worked its way around his tongue, thick with spit and nothing close to speech. He grimaced, sharp breath huffing through his nose, and tried again, but whatever he was trying to say, his body wouldn’t allow it.

“Sign it to me,” Aspiration said with her hands. Fortune shook his head violently and, with a cry more animal than infernii, hurled the bowl across the tent. Blunted shouts followed, choked sounds coughed out like knotted rope until he strangled himself with them, hitching to a halt. He buried his face in his hands, claws scraping through the tangled mess of his long, dark hair. He wouldn’t let anyone touch it. Wouldn’t let anyone close to his head and his broken horns.

Aspiration knelt silently for a moment, then got up, went across the tent, and picked up the bowl, which still had a portion of soup in it. She took it back over to Fortune and waited for him to look up at her.

“I don’t know what clan you’re from,” she said, “but around here, only infants throw their food.”

And then she dumped the bowl out over his head.

He spluttered and spat, gaping at her with a look of utter outrage beneath the broth trickling down his cheeks. A chunk of shellfiend clung to one eyebrow, and a decoration of herbs splattered his deep violet skin like fragrant freckles. He blinked. Aspiration folded her arms. He blinked again, then started to wheeze and at first she thought it was some new sickness she’d brought on him, and wouldn’t Intuition just chew her to pieces for that—then she realised he was laughing.

It was the first time he’d made any sound but one of pain since she’d brought him to the camp.

She went and fetched a cloth, then knelt to help clean him up. “You’ll get well,” she said quietly, as he mopped at his face. “Even if you don’t get your voice back, you’ll get well. You’ll live.”

“Sorry,” he signed clumsily, then motioned at the empty bowl with his tail, head cocked questioningly.

“Only if you promise not to throw it this time.”

His smile was so sweet that she wondered what it had been like before he’d gotten hurt. The kind of charming that got him whatever he wanted, she suspected. She got to her feet. “Alright. I’ll be back soon.”

Before she could take a step, he caught her wrist.

“Th’n…yuh…”

The rasping syllables were barely intelligible, but they were the closest thing to words he’d managed since he’d woken up. Aspiration smiled.

“You’re welcome.”