Fire - Kristin Cashore [134]
‘You’ve lost weight,’ he said to her finally, his unhappy eyes on her face. ‘And you have this horrible empty look in your eyes that makes me want to shake you.’
Fire smoothed his hair again, and chose her words carefully, finding ones that would not make her cry. ‘I don’t think I’m moping, exactly,’ she said. ‘I don’t feel entirely connected to myself, Garan.’
‘Your power is strong,’ he said. ‘I can feel it. You soothed me right away.’
She wondered if a person could be powerful, but inside be broken into pieces, and shaking, all the time.
She studied him again. He really didn’t look well. He was carrying too much.
‘What is the work you need me to do?’ she asked.
He said, ‘Would you be willing to ease the pain of the soldiers in this fort who are dying?’
THE HEALING WORK of the fort took place in the enormous downstairs ward that was the residence of five hundred soldiers during peacetime. There was no glass in the windows and the shutters were drawn now to conserve heat, which came from fireplaces along the walls and from a fire in the middle of the floor, its smoke billowing haphazardly toward an open flue in the ceiling that led all the way to the roof and the sky.
The room was dim, and soldiers were moaning and crying out, and the place had a smell of blood and smoke and something else cloying that stopped Fire at the entrance. It was too much like stepping into one of her nightmares. She couldn’t do it.
But then she saw a man lying on his back in a bed, his nose and ears black like her fingers, and only one hand resting on his chest, for the other was gone completely, a stump wrapped with gauze. He was gritting his teeth, hot and shaking, and Fire went to him, because she could not stop her compassion.
At the very sight of her, some panic inside him seemed to still. She sat at the edge of the bed and looked into his eyes. She understood that he was exhausted, but too distracted with pain and fear to rest. She took away his sense of his pain and soothed his fear. She helped him to fall asleep.
THIS WAS HOW Fire became a fixture in the healing room; for she was even better than the surgeons’ drugs at taking pain away, and every kind of pain was present in that room. Sometimes it was enough to sit with a soldier to calm him, and sometimes, as when he was having an arrow pulled, or a waking surgery, it took more. There were days when her mind was in several parts of the room at once, soothing pain where it was worst, while her body walked up and down the rows of patients, her hair loose and her eyes seeking the eyes of the men and women in the beds who felt less frightened for having seen her.
It surprised her how easy it was to talk to soldiers who were dying, or soldiers who would never be well again, or who had lost their friends, and were afraid for their families. She had thought she‘d already reached her capacity for pain and had no room inside her for more. But she remembered having told Archer once that you could not measure love on a scale of degrees, and now she understood that it was the same with pain. Pain might escalate upward and, just when you thought you’d reached your limit, begin to spread sideways, and spill out, and touch other people, and mix with their pain. And grow larger, but somehow less oppressive. She had thought herself trapped in a place outside the ordinary feeling lives of people; she had not noticed how many other people were trapped in that place with her.
She finally began to let Clara into that place. She told Clara what Clara’s own grief had been yearning for: the facts of what had happened.
‘He died alone,’ she said to Clara quietly.
‘And,’ Clara said, just as quietly