Oleander

XX. Blind (part two)

"Yalira, I—" he began, frowning. She recognized his tone—the same she'd used so many times before—the soft, sorrow-touched cadence that meant to ease the unforgivable sharpness of truth. She hated him for it. How many of her patients had hated her for the very same? How foolish to have once taken pride in those careful tones.

"I saw you," Yalira breathed, digging her nails into her palms to keep the unfair ire from her voice. Her eyes dropped to the deep red of the wine, so crimson as near to be black. Her dark reflection, stained in rich color, rippled on the surface. It stung to meet the hollow shadows of her darkened gaze. He had run back to the altar. Through smoke and night, he had joined the effort in battling chaos and flame. And she had fled and pretended her weak attempts for help were enough. Poisonous coils twisted around her heart.

Yalira described her flight, Shadow's swift hooves through the nightmare to which she condemned her priestesses to suffer. Self-loathing, thick and toxic against her tongue, poured into each line, each haunted memory. She did not leave out any details of her cowardice, of her shame. For all the love the world claimed she had, she had not stopped to face the danger. She had not slowed to spirit away any other survivors. And when her weak appeal for aid was met with barest obstacle, she crumbled into helplessness. She wanted him to know the truth of her weakness. For surely Andar would not spare her mercy.

Yalira had waited for the edge of the knife to slide between her ribs, that promised punishment, and now she waited for the deserved blow.

Andar evaded. "Fear is where monsters are born." He frowned. "It is where man becomes animal." He explained. It was venomous fear that infected the slums more than did the unnatural sickness, and fear that kept their neighbors locked in their homes. And it was fear, or at least some cousin of it, that withered Yalira's spirit into silence. The people had no strategy in battling it, he went on, and their frantic efforts hurt more than they helped. Men argued over where to send leaking buckets of water until their intentions became ashen mud beneath their feet.

She turned from his bright eyes. The empathy there was discomforting and foreign.

"There are those who take advantage of fear." Looting, thievery, rape, violence. Those shades thrived on restlessness and strife. Guilt resurfaced: she had clung to her escape from the wild panic with little thought for her priestesses and the tragedy they might bear. But in a patient cadence, Andar continued before she could chase that spiraling shame. "And there are those who rise above it."

He spoke of a small band that had fallen into a rudimentary formation around the doomed altar in meager defense. A handful of men and women, holding stones and clubs and the sharp edges of broken things, who stood to protect those more vulnerable. Survivors, he mused, who wished to pay the service forward. The weak protecting the weak.

He had passed their ranks, attempted to organize them into a guard, when fire caught to the altar's roof. The sun-cooked thatch, the ancient timbers, the flames spread quickly into its skeleton, festered into the structure in a shower of red and gold.

"I hated you in that moment," he said, with an edge of flinty humor in his words. His voice held no fear, but Yalira wondered if she imagined it there, in the way his arms flexed and released, bronze skin shifting in firelight. She wondered if she only wanted to see it in him. "I hated myself, for not hating you enough."

He had entered the fire-promised threshold, regardless. Just as fear did not live in his breath, arrogance was neither found. Andar spoke without embellishment, without attention to his thoughts or actions. Instead, he lauded Mathais, who had silently organized the priestesses to cover their faces in soaked shawls, who aimed to lead them from the impending inferno and into the rioting sea.