Текст книги "The Last Hour of Gann"

Автор книги: R. Lee Smith

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Текущая страница: 40 (всего у книги 80 страниц)

BOOK VI

GANN

Thunder, falling like a hammer into her brain, knocking her out of her nice, safe sleep and into reality. She heard screaming, her own, and then felt hands, not her own. She fought them, but the hands were thunder, inescapable, pressing her down and holding her fast in this world of cold and fear and hunger.

It hurt. Amber tried to scream, but she couldn’t find her voice and didn’t have much breath anyway. She managed a hoarse groaning sound, utterly swallowed by the pound and roll of the thunder, and after that had to just lie there under the hands and feel her heart racing in terror because she didn’t know where she was or why or even who.

Flapping. The world was made of leather walls close around her and those walls were flapping. The wind had its jaws around the world and was shaking them, shaking them. The thunder was its voice and its fists. At each new crash and roar, she screamed and struggled, but the hands owned her. They pushed her down, they held her, and the thunder opened its throat and breathed her back inside it.

* * *

The second time Amber opened her eyes, it was calmer, both inside the tent, where the wind still steadily shook the walls, and in her mind, where the storm had mostly ended. She rolled and kicked her way onto her side, then lay weakly panting, wondering where in the hell she was.

She could see. The air in the tent was an unhealthy, mottled yellow—the color of daylight filtered first by clouds and then by skins—but she could see, and by an exhausting process of elimination, she eventually realized that the only reason she could possibly see Meoraq’s leather tent on every side of her was if she was in it. Why was she in the lizard’s tent again? Why did everything hurt? And why was she so dry?

The dryness was worse than the hurt, actually. Her tongue felt swollen and sandpapery and stung when she tried to lick moisture out of her mouth. Her lips were unfeeling things, cracked and scaled—Meoraq’s mouth. Even her eyes felt dry. All of that, and yet she was soaked in wetness. The leather mat she lay on squished at her every feeble movement; she could feel beads of moisture tickling over her belly, her breasts, the hollow of her throat, her thighs. Her hair was plastered against her cheeks and neck, ugly to feel and probably pretty damn rank. Rain? Sweat? Did it matter?

Amber found a gripping place on the itchy blanket lying like lead over her body and fought it off. It was not a fight of just one battle. This was ridiculous. She had not been that damn sick. No one could be that damn sick!

She sat up. Her head swam and then hit something. The mat. She’d fallen over? Yes, she had. She sat up again.

Light. She warded it off with one raised hand, then promptly hit her head on the ground again because she apparently needed both hands to hold herself up. Two sudden dives to the mat in as many minutes was too much for her; she dragged her fists up under her chin and lay shivering, wishing the light would go away.

It did, but suddenly Meoraq’s huge black body was coming at her, and even though she knew it was him, knew it, panic still rolled its own thunder over her and she wheezed out a little scream. That was stupid. She frowned, gasping in the aftershocks of that pointless terror, as Meoraq’s scaly hands dipped impersonally beneath her armpits and hauled her up.

She couldn’t remember ever being carried before. Ever. Not even as a little girl. It was an odd feeling. Her legs dragged bonelessly across the mat until he got an arm under her and she flopped against the plates of his chest and then she was up. Carried.

“Too heavy,” she mumbled, embarrassed. “Don’t.”

He grunted in the space above her head and shouldered the tent-flap open. Out they went into the unbelievably cold air, air so fresh and clear it seemed to cut her brain when she breathed it in. The light was blinding. She slapped some of it off and then just rested with her hands over her face, rocking limply back and forth as Meoraq walked, wishing he’d put her down. She didn’t want anyone to see her being carried like this. She especially didn’t want anyone to see it when Meoraq dropped her fat ass on the ground.

But no one was saying anything. It was pretty windy, but she still ought to be able to hear them murmuring and snickering at each other. If nothing else, Crandall should be making a few comments. Especially since…oh for Christ’s sake, she was completely naked.

“Put me back!” Amber wailed, pressing her hands even harder against her face because now it made perfect sense that no one was talking and if she had to see them struck speechless by the sight of her naked body, she was going to die right on the spot. “Damn it, lizardman, put me down!”

He did. She felt herself swoop downwards, bump up against his bent knee, and then finish out the slow fall in a heap over the hard, frozen ground. She curled miserably around herself, knowing she couldn’t cover everything, and finally made herself face the horror head-on.

Only no one was there.

She kept stupidly staring, right on over nothing, nothing, and more nothing all the way to the horizon. She could see the blackened rings where the campfires had been. She could certainly see the wide path where all their tromping feet had flattened the prairie grass. But the places where the bivies and tents should be poking up out of the ground were empty.

Meoraq’s leather teepee was the only one left.

Anywhere.

Something nudged her arm. She blinked around at the mouth of a small, shiny flask, then followed it up Meoraq’s arm to his face.

“What happened?” she croaked. “Where is everyone?”

He took her wrist, put the flask in her hand, and made her take it to her mouth. She needed his help to hold it while she drank. The warm water cut her mouth all to hell. She choked and he let her choke, but after she was done, he made her drink again. She had maybe half a dozen swallows before her stomach cramped, and then had just enough instinct to shove the flask back and bend forward before puking it up.

It came out as smooth and tasteless as it had gone in. That made her want to throw up again, but a froggy belch was all she could manage. She groaned and started to cup protectively at her stomach, but Meoraq took her wrist and put the flask back in her hand.

“I can’t,” she said, trying to push it away.

His spines flattened.

So she drank and even though he made her take twice as much, it stayed miraculously down. Her mouth, wet, throbbed with hurt, but she could feel the rest of her sucking the moisture in, and at the end of his third silent urging, the flask was dry.

He took it back with a grunt of satisfaction, then got up and left her there. She looked after him as he went back inside his tent, and kept right on looking because it was still the only one around.

Meoraq came back with his blanket and draped it around her shoulders, tying the corners together so the wind couldn’t blow it off. It was warm, but so heavy. So ridiculously heavy.

“I’m not supposed to get sick,” she told him. “I got the Vaccine. We all got it. I can’t get sick anymore, they said so. They promised. What happened to me?”

“What do you remember?”

“Everything!”

“Tell me.” He hesitated, then gestured toward her stomach. “Had you…been having pains? Were you hurting…all that time?”

“Huh? No, I was fine. We were talking. We…” She thought about it, reaching up to rub at her thick head as if she could comb out a clearer memory with her fingers. It seemed to help, actually. “You told that horrible story about your father.”

He drew back a little. “Horrible?”

“And then…and then I was banking the fires and packing the food. I don’t…I don’t remember going to bed. I don’t…” Something tugged at her, just a flutter of sound, an impression more than a real thought: Snakebite. “I think something bit me.”

He seemed to relax, just a little. “There was a mark,” he said, and looked away.

He watched the clouds roll by. She watched the empty camp. There was no time.

“Where’s my stuff?” she asked.

“In my tent. Do not trouble yourself for any of it now.”

Amber nodded and pulled the blanket closer around her body. “Where are my clothes?”

“Washed and in your pack. For now, you do not require them.”

Which was a nice way of saying he wanted to wait until he was sure she wouldn’t piss in them. As was only sensible.

She nodded again, rubbed at her mouth, sat there.

A few seconds passed.

“Where is my sister?”

Meoraq did not answer. He didn’t even look at her, just turned his eyes up in his restless way and watched the clouds churn by.

“How long have they been gone?”

“Five days.”

“Five days?” She brought her hand up, but didn’t touch her eyes. After a while, she just dropped it again. “Where…I mean, did they go someplace…to wait for us?”

He did not answer.

“They wouldn’t just leave us,” she argued, trying to stare him down, but he kept watching the sky. “They wouldn’t do that.”

No reply.

“Oh come on! My sister? Nicci? She wouldn’t…”

He watched the clouds.

She wanted to keep talking. God knew, there were arguments she could be making. It was absurd to think that they’d actually packed up and left her and no, she wasn’t the easiest person in the world to get along with and sure, Everly Scott hated her guts, but no sane person would ever go along with leaving someone behind like that. Just because they didn’t like her didn’t mean they didn’t need her. And if they needed her for nothing else, she was still one of Scott’s precious wombs, wasn’t she? He wouldn’t walk away from that. And no one would walk away from Meoraq, that was just insane! He was the only one who knew where to find this temple they all wanted so desperately to find, so obviously, they were waiting for them.

Just up ahead.

They’d left her.

Amber touched her fingertips to her lips, but they weren’t trembling. She felt at the thin skin beneath her eyes, but it was dry. Her heart felt cold, but it kept right on beating. She realized, impossible as it seemed, that this wasn’t going to kill her.

Meoraq hadn’t moved. He looked perfectly comfortable as he hunkered there against the wind and seemed content to read whatever epic novels were being printed for his viewing pleasure across the sky, and if he cared at all that he had been abandoned by Commander Scott and his brave pioneers, he showed no sign of it.

“Five days isn’t very long,” said Amber, and looked at the sky. “We could catch up.”

Meoraq grunted.

“When are we leaving?”

He rubbed at the ridges over his eyes. Then he looked at her, only this time, she was the one who didn’t look back. He hissed under his breath and looked back at the sky.

The way the clouds moved really was pretty hypnotic. She could understand why he did this so often.

“We will go when you can walk,” he said at last.

“Then we’re leaving tomorrow. I don’t care if we only make it to the top of that ridge,” she said, pointing. “But we’re going. They need to be able to look back and…and see us trying to catch up.”

He turned his head and spat, letting the wind take that little comment and carry it off. “So be it.”

“And we’re going to catch up.”

“If it is God’s will.”

“God has nothing to do with it. Nicci is waiting for me.”

That, he didn’t answer. Instead, he picked her up again and started walking. She put her arm around his neck in the hopes of better distributing her weight but thought she felt him stiffen, so she took her arm back and just hugged unhappily at herself until she was back inside the tent (which reeked humiliatingly of sweat and bile and oh what’s that gentle fragrance boys and girls that’s piss is what that is) and out of the wind. He set her on the mat (she turned her head so she wouldn’t have to see how badly she’d stained it), covered her over with the blanket and the leaden fur besides, and stood up again.

Just stood there. After a moment, he backed up. After a few moments more, he opened the tent-flap and put one foot outside, but he didn’t leave, he just looked at her. Or maybe he was only pretending to look at her while he aired the tent out. It needed it. How many times had she pissed the bed, his bed? How many times had she shit in it? And how could she even care about that when she knew that all the rest of them were out there right now, that some of them might even die because she’d made Meoraq choose her over the others? And would Nicci be one of them?

Her eyes stung; she was too dry to make tears, but her vision blurred anyway. She watched through this tearless haze as Meoraq let the hide-flap fall with him still on the inside. She scratched her eyes shut and turned her face away, but soon felt his scaly fingers on her chin. His strong hand stroked once across her matted hair and down to cup the back of her neck. He pulled her close and pressed his cool, unfeeling brow to hers. She could feel his bony ridges digging at her skull, feel each hot puff of breath against her throat. “Rest in His sight. He sees you well, Soft-Skin. He sees us both.”

“Tell him to watch out for Nicci. Because I’m not there, Meoraq. And neither are you.” She wiped at her eyes—still dry, still hurting—and pushed him away. “And until she’s back, don’t you dare tell me this is God’s will. If your god sent my baby sister out there to die, then I hate your fucking god. I hate him and I’ll tell him so to his face. I’ll tell him…”

She lost her breath and then the train of her thoughts and finally had to let him lay her gently down and cover her up again beneath the crushing weight of the blanket. “Tell her she can have the mat,” Amber whispered. She no longer knew precisely who she was talking to or why, but the words seemed very important. “Tell her I’m sorry and she can have it now. I’m so…” Her thoughts slipped again and she forgot how to end. Sorry? Thirsty? “Tired,” she finished.

She slept.

2

Meoraq sat up all night, watching Amber sleep by lamplight (and often resting his hand between her teats to feel the breaths he could plainly hear and see). Through every long hour, Gann rode his back and whispered in his ear that this was the last rally of a dying soul and that dawn would find her cold beneath his hand, but Sheul’s mercy prevailed. She lived. She drank—water at first, then tea, and finally broth made of boiled cuuvash. She mumbled in her restless dreams at times, but when her eyes opened, she always knew him. She had come out of the very shadow of death and she would be well.

And she did make it to the top of the ridge the next day, but only because Meoraq carried her. Six steps. That was all she could manage on her own. Six steps, and they left her so drained that she fell asleep soon after he set her down. Meoraq built her a fire and started the stones heating for tea, then ran on ahead along the wide trampled path left by the humans’ passage.

He didn’t go far, just up to the next rise. He could see perhaps a quarter-span from this vantage, and Scott’s trail cut through all of it, keeping steadily eastward until it vanished over the hills. He waited for some glimmer of the disappointment a righteous man would feel and felt none. If he’d found them, he would be honor-bound to go and fetch them back and he hated even the thought of that. He would do it if Sheul asked it of him, and for Amber’s sake he would even do it in good humor, but if he never saw them again, he would lose no sleep over it.

The next day, Amber managed a little better distance, but still needed Meoraq’s arm to lean on to get over the next rise, where she took one exhausted look at Scott’s trail winding away into nothing and began to cry. Meoraq kept his eyes fixed on the trail and pretended not to notice. This was ludicrous enough when she was only weeping, but when she reached the end of her tears, she just as suddenly fell to shouting.

She said things. Meoraq tried not to listen. Grief had made her half-sick and weariness took her the rest of the way. Once she’d rested, she might not even remember this…remarkably creative string of profanities…so it behooved him to just let her vomit it all out.

He stood while Amber cupped her flat face and screamed Nicci’s name until her voice roughened. He studied the rippling lines of shine in the wind-blown grass as Amber cursed Scott for a madman and a murderer. He watched the clouds when she turned on him, slapping and punching at his chest—the blows as weak as a child’s—and ordered him to go after them, find them, bring them back.

At last, the tears returned. Meoraq helped her collapse without hurting herself. He left her moaning into her hands and went out into the plains for water. There was ice along the bank of the creek where he drew it. The first ice of the season, thin and white as paper…but it would grow.

She refused to speak to him that night. When he tried to put her mat in his tent, she pulled it out and sat rebelliously with the fire between them and her spear over her lap, just like she thought she could hold a watch.

Meoraq went to his tent and meditated. When he emerged, she was soundly sleeping, still sitting up. He put her to bed; the Amber he had always been able to wake just by walking past her did not stir even when he carried her into his tent and took her boots off.

She slept through the night, past dawn, and deep into the day. When she finally emerged, Meoraq had just finished the last of the hot tea. He grunted a greeting and began to brew more.

Amber sat down there in the mouth of his tent and watched him change stones and meditate. Neither spoke as the water heated. Meoraq could only hope that was a good sign, because she wasn’t showing him any expression to gauge her mood by.

“When will you be ready to walk?” he asked finally.

She stared at him dully for a long time and then said, in a voice still rough from yesterday’s screaming, “Two or three days, I guess.”

Relief struck him like a slap—a short shock and a spreading glow. He grunted again and filled the steeper with some of the redsash leaves. She didn’t want to be told that was the right decision. A brace or two ago, Meoraq had known nothing at all about women, but he already knew that much.

“Where did you get that?”

The lifeless question held no clues. Meoraq followed Amber’s incurious gaze to the tea box in his hands. Odd…he’d never really looked at it before, beyond determining that it was sufficiently lavish to satisfy his spite. Now its inlay reminded him in an uncomfortable way of the mosaic on the wall in the ruins—a lost world, a flying ship.

He flicked his spines and tossed the steeper into the stewing pouch. “From a man in Tothax.”

“A man?” She took the box back and inspected it more closely. “Hunh. It doesn’t look like something a man would give.”

“He didn’t have a choice.”

Amber opened and closed a few drawers, sniffing disinterestedly at the various blends. “I guess you like tea a lot, huh?”

“Better than I like boiled water.”

“Please go after them.” The hoarseness of her damaged voice robbed it of all passion. Her face showed no more emotion than her voice, but her eyes saw him, he was sure. She was very close to death (he would never admit it, but Meoraq had begun to wonder if she might be dead already, her unburnt clay going through the motions of life and no more), but she was not speaking from grief now. She thought she was calm, reasonable. She thought she could convince him.

“I swore I would not leave you,” he said.

“I’m asking you to go.”

“I didn’t swear myself to you.”

Amber put his tea box back in his pack and his pack back in his tent. “It’s the same as killing them, you know.” Her voice was still calm, still reasonable. “Scott can say anything he wants about his imaginary skyport, but if you know they’ll die without you and you let them leave anyway, you killed them.”

The Sheulek in him judged that uncomfortably close to truth, but not entirely so. “I gave them a choice,” he told her, which was also not a whole truth.

“We aren’t leaving tracks.” Amber turned her head to look back the way they’d come, but there was nothing to show their passage. “Every day, the ground is getting harder and the wind is always blowing. When I woke up, we were five days behind them. Now we’re seven, because I can’t get myself together. And we’ll be ten days or more before I can make a real effort here, and by then, their trail will be gone.”

“They will go east,” he reminded her. “They will go on to Xi’Matezh the same as we do. He thinks his ship is there.”

“They’ll starve.”

“Starvation is not a quick death.” He hated to give the thought, plausible as it was, any more validation, but it was only truth. “Their strength will flag long before they fail. They will den down and we will find them.”

“Thirst, then. They don’t know how to look for water.”

“They won’t have to look too hard after all this season’s rains, and they have nearly all my flasks to help them carry it. Apart from which, even before I found you, S’kot had sense enough to make his camp by water.”

“They’ll freeze. Animals could eat them. The storms will come back. Another starship could crash on top of them! A thousand things could happen, damn it!”

“The tea is ready,” said Meoraq, dipping his cup. “Come and have some.”

She did not come, but she took the tea when he offered it. She drank, wiped her eyes, then drank the rest. He refilled the cup. She held it and stared at him.

“They made a choice,” he said again. “So did I.”

“And that’s it, huh?” She shook her head side-to-side, started to drink, then breathed out a harsh sigh and put the cup aside. “Do you have a family, Meoraq?”

The question took him aback. He could not imagine what had prompted it and dreaded where it would lead. He felt his spines lower and had to force them up again in feigned nonchalance. “Two brothers. Some blood-kin in other cities. Why?”

“How would you feel if they were out here? How easy would it be for you to just sit back and say God will keep them safe?”

“Nduman is out here,” he replied. “At least as often as I am. And Sheul keeps him safe. Salkith…You may have a point about Salkith, but I feel I ought to observe that not even he would be out here following S’kot.”

“All right, so she made a mistake. You don’t just give up on family!”

‘She did,’ Meoraq thought. To keep from saying it—and oh, but his whole heart and soul wanted to say it, even knowing how deeply it would stab her—he said instead, “Have you any other family but that…but N’ki?”

“No. It’s just me and her.” The words faltered as they left her mouth. She looked away. “I guess it’s just me now.”

“I am with you.”

“Yeah.” But she stayed quiet for a time, just staring into nothing. At last, while he struggled to find something to say to bring her back from wherever she had gone, she stirred and looked at him. “What about you? Where are your parents?”

“My mother died years ago. My father…very recently.”

“I’m sorry,” she said, just as N’kosa had done.

“Thank you.” He still wasn’t certain that was the right response. “He served well, died well, and dwells in our true Father’s Halls now.”

Her brows creased. “How do you have a good death?”

“He died in judgment and Sheul was with him.”

“That makes a difference, huh?”

“Yes.”

She fell into a silence, which should have been welcome enough, but oddly wasn’t. At length, unable to think of what else to say and loathe to let the conversation die, he said, “Your mother is dead also?” and wanted to hit himself for saying it almost immediately. When was that ever good conversation?

Yet Amber merely said, “Yeah. But I don’t think God was with her.”

It was a startling thing to say on its own merit, and doubly so for the dry way in which she said it. “Why not?”

She did not answer, only stared into the fire and was silent. The light had a way of playing about her face, making her seem a stranger—too hard-worn for his Amber.

“How did she die?” he asked.

She sighed and rubbed at her face. “Christ, I don’t even know how to answer that. I guess some people would say she was sick.”

“What do you say?” he asked cautiously.

“I try not to say anything. How did your mother die?”

He frowned, but answered readily enough. “She was probably childsick. I remember she complained of feeling overtired for a few days and that she felt heavy. My father offered to send for a surgeon, but she said she was sure it would pass. Then one night, she just started screaming.”

The walls of House Uyane were strong. It had not been Yecedi’s screams but that of her dressing-maid running to Rasozul’s chamber that woke Meoraq and his brothers in the room they shared when home from school. Too big to share a cupboard, too young to have earned a room of their own, they sat up in huddles on the floor, looking at each other in the light from the lamp that stupid Salkith couldn’t sleep without and listened to the thunder of their father’s feet racing to the other end of the house.

He was back again in mere moments, it seemed, bellowing for the carriage. Salkith, the only one of them senseless enough to act, opened the door just as Rasozul flew by with their mother thrashing and weeping in his arms. Salkith, naturally, dropped right there in the doorway and started crying, but their father hadn’t even seemed to see him. All the rest of that night and deep into the next day, they waited. When Rasozul finally opened their door, he had seemed a different man, or a dead one—cold clay in the shape of their father—the air around him choked with the stink of smoke more foul than anything he’d ever smelled in his life. Salkith took one look and started bawling again. And their father, who seldom had much patience for Salkith’s soft-headed moods, slid down the door’s frame to the floor, pulled Salkith onto his lap, and began to weep with him.

“Meoraq?”

He stirred and focused on Amber, on whose strange face his eyes had been resting all this time while he sat silent. He grunted an acknowledgement at her to disguise his embarrassment at losing himself that way, but her creased brows only creased that much further.

“I guess you were close, huh?”

“No,” he admitted. “I didn’t…know her very well.”

Now they were both quiet. Meoraq, determined not to fall back into that same pool of sucking mud, gazed into the fire instead and refused to think about Yecedi’s pyre and the stink that had clung to his father’s skin for days afterwards.

“My mother killed herself,” said Amber.

He looked at her. She looked at the fire.

“I don’t know if she meant to. I guess it could have been an accident. She was taking something that she thought would make her feel good, something she knew was poison. She took it anyway and she took too much. I came home and she was trashing the apartment, puking and pissing herself and smashing stuff on the walls. She was out of care credits, so they wouldn’t send a medi-bus. I had to drive her to the hospital with her screaming in my ear and Nicci crying in the back and me yelling at both of them to just shut up.” She was quiet for a moment. “Those were my last words to her. ‘Shut the fuck up.’” Another short silence. Amber shrugged and looked at the fire. “And they let her die. You know how it is. High risk, low insurance. I guess I should be mad at them…but I’m not. I’m mad at her.”

Meoraq looked lamely back into the fire. He wanted to say something, but he didn’t know what. He did not know what poison the woman had taken, but suspected it was something like phesok, which fools often chewed in defiance of the Word, breaking faith with Sheul for a handful of dreams. What could he tell her now to comfort her? Amber’s mother did not see their true Father’s face; she had masked herself forever.

“When they told us she was dead, do you know the first thing I felt? I mean, the very first thing.” Amber uttered a short flutter of humorless laughter. “I was relieved. Nice daughter, huh? I’d just lost my mother, not to mention our home, our insurance and our whole damn life, but for that first moment, the weight fell off, not on, you know?”

He grunted, uncomfortable but listening.

“She wasn’t a bad person, I guess.” Amber glanced at him. “She didn’t build machines or anything. And she had friends. Not many, but she had them. It was just me.”

“You?”

“Who didn’t like her.” Her eyes flinched even when no other part of her did. She looked away. “I didn’t like her,” she said again. “My own mother. She was just so…bitter and angry and so fucking eager to stick poison in her veins and trade everything she had—including us—for more. And I know that’s a pretty sick excuse, but I felt like I’d been watching her die for years. As bad as it was, having it over, finally over, felt good.”

Her voice cracked. Meoraq frowned and watched the coals.

“I wish I was the kind of person who could just…miss her! But I don’t. You have to understand, she was my mother and for the last three years of her life, all I wanted was to just grab Nicci and get away from her. And then she finally died and I don’t even think I waited a whole day before I started planning how I was going to make Nicci get on the ship that brought her here!” She flung out her hands to show him all the empty world, then slapped them down again on her thighs. “I appreciate that you saved my life. I’m grateful. It may not sound like it, but I am. I don’t want to die. But how could you? One person—and I don’t care who that person is—one person is not worth the lives of fifty other people, especially when that one person is me!”

“You?”

“I’m not…I’m not nice, damn it! You put everyone else in danger to save a horrible human being!”

“You are as our Father made you, Soft-Skin.” And as she slapped her hands over her face, he calmly went on, “He knew you would come here, where modesty and gentleness and womanly subservience could only get you killed. All things follow Sheul’s great design.”

“Bullshit. God has nothing to do with me.”

“Do not be blasphemous.” He reached out to gentle the chastisement with a tap to her knee, and another, for no real reason at all, to the soft blade of her cheek. “When you came upon your mother sick with poison, you tried to save her. You say you didn’t like her, but you tried.”