Honor-Bound [ Lore of Penrua: Book III ]

41

It was late the night she did it, and cold.

Ealin lay in her bed in the apprentices' quarters, her eyes closed as she feigned sleep, but she was too nervous to actually fall asleep. She waited until the hour was sufficiently late. She waited until all of her fellow apprentices had settled, until the sounds of hushed talking and rustling of bed covers had stilled for the evening, and then, only then, did she rise from her bed.

She looked around the long dormitory hall. There, narrow pallets were arranged with their heads toward the walls, a small chest at the end of each one, and in the beds lay the apprentice mages, near fifteen of them, each of them like a perfectly-matched game piece from a set for cross-the-sea. They lay with their heads on their pillows, all of them exhausted from the day's long work and study.

Ealin reached under her pillow and pulled out a small canvas bag. She tucked it into the front of her robe and then crept from the hall, moving silently on bare feet in the hopes that she would not be noticed by anyone—especially not the apprentice-master, a cruel whip of a man.

In her bag, Ealin had everything she needed except the solitude to work, and that, she found in a little-used storage chamber not far off from the kitchens. There, she had already placed an oil lamp and flint and tinder that would provide the illumination she would need to do her work.

The hinges squealed as she opened the door, but it was past the middle hour of the night, and everyone was abed. Ealin shut the door behind her, and in the pitch darkness, she groped for the lamp and made quick work of lighting it. She adjusted the wick, and the golden light spilled throughout the tiny chamber, illuminating the corners and casting flickering shadows up the walls.

She shivered.

From her canvas bag she took cotton padding, a roll of white muslin, a sewing kit, and a small flask of liquor. She also took out a bloodstone the size of her thumb, oblong and smooth, and a small kitchen knife she had ferreted away weeks ago for this very purpose.

Ealin laid these things on the canvas bag, spreading them before her on the stone floor.

This will work, she thought. This is the answer to his ambitions. I have solved it. If only I am brave enough.

She drew a deep breath, uncorking the flask and first wetting the blade, then the bloodstone. And then, in the privacy of that little room, she took off her roughspun robe and her shift and sat, shivering and naked, on the floor.

She had chosen a place that would be concealed by clothing, because she imagined there would be a scar. Over her chest, above her heart. She set the point of the blade to her breast and drew a breath.

The pain is temporary.

It took a very long time, owing to how much her hands shook. It is a strange thing, to cause oneself such pain—to carve a line down one's own chest in blood, opening a gap in the flesh sufficient to accept a foreign object the size of a young woman's thumb. There was so much blood. She rinsed some of it away with the liquor and had to bite her own tongue to smother her scream. It took some time for her to gather her wits again. When she did, she poured a little liquor over the bloodstone.

Ealin's fingers slipped and fumbled as she tried to tuck the bloodstone into her body. She was no stranger by this point to blood, nor to wounds, and so the nausea that had once threatened each time her father took a needle or a knife to her was nowhere to be felt.

Once the stone was pocketed beneath her skin, Ealin pressed the edges of her skin together and sat, shivering, staring down at the puckered wound and at the blood that had run in streaks over her breast and her stomach.