There was a heresy repeated here and there, in low voices, among those blessed by megin: to be touched by the miracle was also to be cursed by it.
Grim had never wholly dismissed it.
Megin gave much. Some things were the same for everyone. Strength where there had been none. Breath when the body demanded ground. Clarity in moments that should have been nothing but panic. Other things came crooked. Gifts that seemed a blessing until the hour came to carry them.
His was one of those.
They called it the empath's grace. It sounded better than it was.
In practice, Grim felt what did not always belong to him.
Pain. Fear. Anger. Relief. Fragments of memory stuck to sensation. They almost never came whole. They came as pieces. A strange taste in the mouth. A tightness in the chest. A weariness that had not been born in him. All it took was proximity, touch, or, worse still, giving too much of himself to another. The whites avoided that when they could. They healed without pouring themselves out. They eased without opening too much room. Each of them knew the price of linking himself to someone beyond a certain point.
That morning, Grim was paying it.
The boy seated in front of him-tall, sun-burned, one arm fewer, and possessed of a calm that deserved no trust-hurt inside him in a bad way. The left shoulder burned in absent flesh. The chest carried a deep, dry irritation, as if each breath wanted to remind the body what had been taken from it. There was cynicism there too, and anger waiting in the dark, and buried beneath it all, flashes of the wrong kind of joy. Not clean joy. Something more twisted. More dangerous.
Grim felt strange even when he was alone. Near that boy, he felt worse.
"Name?" the other asked.
The voice came out calm. Deep. Far too good for a man so newly torn from death.
"Grim," he answered.
The pain in the shoulder came back stronger the next instant, as though the answer had tightened some invisible bond between them.
Grim drew one deep breath and tried to keep his face neutral.
"And you're Hrafn, right?" he asked. "Are you really well enough to walk?"
He knew he was not.
Hrafn sat on the sparse grass beside a tent, the stump at his shoulder bandaged with the best work they had managed in the rush. He had the color of someone who should have been lying down. Dry mouth. A whole body working harder than it ought to merely to stay upright. Even so, he seemed irritated by his weakness, not mastered by it.
"Ah, I am," Hrafn answered. "It doesn't hurt that much now."
A lie.
Grim felt it before he recognized it as a lie. The pain came in him and did not come in him. There was something almost obscene in sharing another's suffering without deserving it fully. Like tasting someone else's blood on the tongue.
Giving his megin to others was always a risk. For Grim, more than for the other whites. When he healed, he did not hand over only strength. Sometimes he opened a door. And with some people the door took too long to close.
With Hrafn, it was still open.
"Nanna used to say that you had to keep moving in order not to die," Hrafn said.
Sorrow came.
Regret followed right after, dense and swift, like someone trying to close a hand over water.
Grim had never known Nanna, but for an instant he felt the idea of her. Warmth. Smoke. Some old peace. Then the feeling was shoved into some dark corner of Hrafn's mind, as though he himself would not allow it to remain in sight for very long.
The boy then bent a little lower, dragging the fingers of his good hand across the cold grass. The emotion that came from that made Grim frown.
Joy.
Too great for such a small gesture.
Hrafn had been swinging since he woke. Grim had stayed near him almost the whole time. He had seen the silence first-an incorrect silence, hard, while the body still seemed not to understand what was missing. Then came the pain, at last recognized, so strong the boy had nearly doubled over. Then a short laugh, almost a smile without sanity. Now this. Joy at feeling the grass beneath his fingers as though the world still owed him something good.
It was strange.
Worse: Grim did not merely see it. He felt it.
Perhaps that would have been enough to trouble anyone. For him, it was almost unbearable.
"She seems to have been a wise woman," Grim said, choosing his words with care. "In many cases that's true. But you still ought to rest."
He tried to keep his voice low. He did not want to unsettle him more than necessary. Hrafn already seemed sufficiently unsettled inside without anyone's help.
"She was," Hrafn answered, ignoring the rest.
The sorrow returned, smaller this time. It came and went.
Hrafn passed his good hand through his hair, as though smoothing it back were enough to set things in order.
"Why do we have to go to Sahirid?" he asked.
Anger came.
Alive. Sharp. Not an outburst, but a presence.
"Why don't they train us in Brinegard?"
Grim understood the question. He understood even better the anger that came with it. To lose an arm and then be dragged along the road to the Hird's proper city could sound like mockery. On certain days, perhaps it would sound that way even to him.
But understanding did not give birth to an answer.
"There are reasons for it, brother," he said. "I'm sure the Hird has its purpose."
Hrafn watched him in silence for an instant.
Then he brought his hand again to his hair and combed it back, a gesture that seemed more an effort to contain his own mood than vanity.
"What reasons would those be, brother?"
The sarcasm in the question came lightly in the voice.
In the mind, it came worse.
Cold. Mockery. A short practical hatred. For a moment Grim imagined Hrafn spitting on him, rising abruptly and hitting him with his good arm until things turned bad.
"There is no reason for me to know, brother," Grim answered, as gently as he could. "But the Hird remains. The reason must be good enough."
Hrafn looked at him a little longer.
The response that reached Grim was not made of words. It was made of weary contempt. Not enough to become violence. Only enough to make it clear that, at that point, Hrafn placed him in the same sack as the others.
"I understand," was all he said.
Grim found himself thinking, not for the first time that morning, that perhaps Hrafn would not break.
Perhaps he was already broken.
Footsteps approached from the left.
"Voroir," someone called. "The hersir wishes to see you."
Grim lifted his eyes.
The man who had come to summon them was an old voroir with a tired face, one of the many who had survived the night by little. He did not look much at Hrafn. Nor much at Grim. The summons was simple, but there was weight in it.
Leif.
Grim did not like the idea.
He had been the one to treat the hersir when he came back from the fight. He had used more of himself than he ought to have in order to keep Leif on his feet, setting what could be set, closing what could be closed, pushing the rest of the pain into later. Among the whites there, he was the best. He always had been. That was also why the most was demanded of him.
Healing Leif would have been bad enough on an ordinary day.
Linked to Hrafn as he still was now, it would taste like punishment.
The hersir was too much mass for any mind. Too much pain. Too much will. The mere nearness of him weighed even on normal folk. For Grim, who at times felt others as if he wore them inside, standing between Leif and Hrafn at once seemed a rather efficient way of losing his wits before noon.
Even so, he rose.
One knee protested. The whole body protested, in truth, but not with the eloquence of men more badly hurt. Whites were almost never given the luxury of being among those who fell first. They served before, during, and after. That was the way of it.
Hrafn also began to rise.
This time the pain came into Grim before the dry sound of Hrafn's breath. The boy wavered for an instant no longer than a blink. He did not fall. He refused to fall in the same way certain people refused to pray: from pride, anger, or habit.
Grim extended a hand by reflex.
Hrafn saw the gesture.
He did not take it.
He got up alone, pale, a little crooked, but whole enough for stubbornness.
"Excellent," said Grim, before he could stop himself. "So you really are well enough to walk."
Hrafn let out a brief sound through his nose. It did not quite become a laugh.
"See?"
Another lie.
But this time it came accompanied by something that looked, from a distance at least, like dark humor.
Grim nodded.
The three of them began to walk through the camp.
The Star's light had already settled in the sky, making everything clearer than the night had allowed and therefore worse. Dark marks across the road. Splintered wagon remains. Wounded men lying on improvised cloths. Voroirs moving among bodies. Some commons still wept in silence. Others had already dried out.
The smell of blood, ash, and entrails still hung low.
Hrafn saw it all.
Grim felt what came off him when he saw it.
Anger, again. Ill-settled grief. An almost unhealthy attention to detail. And behind all that, something new, still small:
He wanted to understand something.
He feared understanding it.
Grim knew that mixture.
Megin always exacted payment.
Ahead, Leif waited.
Even standing, the hersir looked like a cracked wall that nevertheless refused to fall. The arm hung in a sling. One eye was of no use anymore. His face was marked by dried blood and exhaustion. Even so, there was a presence in him that made men straighten their backs merely by coming near.
Grim felt Leif before he reached him.
Pain. Hunger. Pride. Duty. A kind of rough gratitude for still breathing. All of it mixed in a body that seemed to insist on existing through stubbornness and faith.
Beside that, Hrafn was a bad fire in dry brush.
Grim almost stopped, but kept going.
There was nothing else to do.
And perhaps that was the worst part of gifts like his. In the end, despite all one felt, all one saw, and all one guessed inside others, what remained was still to do the same thing any common man would do.