156 - Yea-many days recovered

“I told you you’d think so,” I said. There is such satisfaction in being right. “But as I said, please assign all the fault to me.” I glanced at Surya again. He was breathing deeply. “I just pulled it off, didn’t unclasp it… it must still be somewhere there, on the shortcut, with a broken link, unless someone picked it up.” How much it had cost him to make, in money or sweat, I had no idea.

“Just say what happened next,” Krero gritted.

“Have you questioned the one who’s still alive?”

“He said you killed their father in the Mezem, and it was his older brother, the one that’s dead, who first hit you and then hacked you up. He said it was in a duel, that he gave you enough time after you woke up that you got up on your own, and fought perfectly well. But aside from a nicely-aimed stab through the heart from Kyirya, the corpse didn’t have a mark on it… you understand why, even though the kid was truth-drugged, I find that very hard to believe?”

I am a private citizen, I thought. Sort of. How interested are the writers going to be in this? How much should I say, how to explain? I got to a knife-edge away from death by accomplishing what I chose. Krero must have seen the wish to evade on my face. “I’ll learn everything, Fourth Chevenga Shae-Arano-e, if I have to truth-drug you.”

So I told them exactly how it had gone, in detail. I managed it smoothly until I got to the realization, and then the tears came too hard and fast to master. “I am asa kraiya. I’m asa kraiya, Krero. It’s what I chose—what I had to choose, over death—and I’ve attained it. That’s why I couldn’t hit him. Your soul says ‘Never again, even if that means death.’ Contradictory, I know… but I knew I was asa kraiya and that was more important. It’s what I had to do.” This all came between sobs; Surya’s hand gripped my arm. I could barely believe what I said next, even as I said it. “I’m not a warrior any more, Krero. I’m not and never will be again.”

He sat for a moment, silence hanging heavy in the room. “So do I have this right?” he said finally. “You’re never going to be able to defend yourself again?”

At a loss for an answer, I looked at Surya. “No,” he said, with blessed firmness. “He will. But he’ll do it in the asa kraiya way, which he doesn’t know yet. Think of Azaila, Krero; would you tangle with him? But he’s asa kraiya.”

“All right. That’s reassuring. How long before you can defend yourself again?”

“Krero,” I said, hearing more tiredness in my voice than I’d intended to be heard, “I have no idea. Right now it’s all I can do to know how to get through the rest of today.”

“He has a lot to deal with,” said Surya. “I think…” He got the aura-seeing gaze. “I think we should schedule the ceremony for about a half-moon from now. It’s only after that that an asakraiyaseye can start the training.”

“That’s too short notice,” I said.

“Oh, right, I’m forgetting, it’s you, you’ll want to invite the whole world—”

“And have me protect it,” cut in Krero.

“But longer than that and we get into winter even in the lowlands, bad traveling… yet I can’t imagine you’re going to want to wait until spring.”

“No, I don’t want to be defenseless that long,” I said. “It should be two months; make it one and a half, and if we start getting invitations out today…”

“No work for seven days,” said Kaninjer, flatly. “Haven’t you noticed that you’re more prone to dizziness today than you were last night? Has anyone told you that a concussion doesn’t just happen with the blow, that it can keep worsening, or that two concussions close together are much worse than twice as bad as one? You value your mental function, don’t you?”

I lay very still and breathed slow and deep, trying to make the room, which was still spinning, though not as hard, stop entirely. It had been going on long enough now that between it and the groin pain, I was a little nauseated. “That’s what you have staff for,” Skorsas said brightly. “I’ll take care of it all, don’t worry.”

Krero had been thinking. Now he got up, leaned over me, seized the hair on either side of my head, and put his nose almost against mine.

“You,” he said, “are going to have at the very least four fully-armed elite warriors within arms’ length of you, every sleeping and waking instant, wherever you go, whatever you do, even to duck behind a bush for a piss, for the rest of your life, and I don’t care if I have to jump up and down on a desk and scream at Assembly to get it passed, but you know what? I don’t think I’ll have to.” Snatching up his helmet, he strode out, slamming the door behind him.

†

I thought that Surya might say it was time to talk that same day, but he signed charcoal. “You need to heal purely physically for a while yet.” It would be three days before Kaninjer would let me walk even on crutches, wanting the calf-wounds well-along in their healing first, and my twice-thumped head to stay on a pillow. So I did the small part Azaila and Surya would let me do of the ceremony planning, which was mostly settling the invitation list. (“This isn’t work, Kan, it’s fun!”)

At one point Krero asked me, “There are going to be how many heads of state here, that I have to keep alive?”

“Be philosophical, Krero,” I answered. “If it hadn’t been this, it would have been my funeral.”

“Yes,” he said without a moment’s pause, “but at least for that I’d have one less head of state to keep alive.”

No one would tell me anything about the ceremony itself except that, at the designated time, I should go to the School of the Sword in my full gear. I gathered I’d be guided through the rest.

I knew it was possible to do an asa kraiya ceremony outdoors, because Surya’s had been, so I asked for that, to allow everyone to see. “You don’t understand,” said Azaila. “It’s supposed to be private. His was in the woods.”

“You must be joking,” I said. “When has anything in my life ever been private?” The compromise we settled on was that the crucial part of it, whatever that was, we’d do inside the School, and the rest outside.

Toras, Tasera and Kyirya all visited that evening, to accept my thanks for saving me. The Games awards had been that day, and they let me know that I’d got only second runner-up for the Gilded Meadowflop Award—given for the most spectacularly dramatic death—in the one game in which I’d been killed out, and nowhere near the overall, an award I’d truly wanted. It’s pointless to have such ambitions against people who dive off cliffs for a pastime, I guess; the man who won had done a twisting double-flip off the crow’s-nest of a ship. I had, however, as everyone expected, won the Steel Circle for best game-warrior overall, an award I didn’t truly want.

I had a feeling Kyirya didn’t want to give me his sword-hand to kiss and press to my brow, in gratitude for saving my life, by the slow way he extended it. I found out later that Toras had had to talk him even into visiting at all, saying it would be wrong not to accept what was truly owed and would be happily given. His hand had a different feel to it, I noticed as I took it in mine; the reason came to me with a shiver. Times of peace make you forget; every warrior of my age had killed too many to count, by the age Kyiri was now. Younger Riji had been his blooding. I should have been the one he talked to about it, if he needed to; I told myself, there are many others just as good, including Toras.

I was not so private a citizen that the writers weren’t interested. Kaninjer insisted on seven days before I spoke to them, though, and I didn’t find myself inclined to buck. They got Krero’s version; he didn’t mention my going asa kraiya, but he did say that my security would be very much tightened.

Just as he’d predicted, he had no trouble getting it passed in Assembly. There were four full-geared elite warriors on my door that night, and a day later two workers knocked, saying they’d come to install shutters. They had the work order, of course, which was signed “Assembly of Yeola-e per Krero Saranyera,” but he’d also armed them with the record of the Assembly vote, listing all the changes. No more breezes from the mountains caressing my cheek at night; the shutters were a handspan thick, bound all around with steel, and had bolts two finger-widths thick. It took them three days to put them in, because they were to be bolted so deep into the stonework around the windows that most of it had to be replaced. I wondered why this seemed darkly familiar, and remembered when they’d barred my window in the Mezem, after I’d almost escaped. Next, I thought, he’ll add a wall and a moat.

The writers wrote what he told them, but rumours flew all over; the reigning notion was soon that it was the death-in-me still working, and people debated whether I should be made legally incompetent and trussed up again. In getting people to see the difference between the death-in-me and asa kraiya, as I had to do, this incident would not help at all.

What would be most convincing, of course, would be an end to these close calls (my life was constantly being measured, it seemed, in ‘yea-many days recovered’). I was reminded again of Iska saying, “You have to stop doing this. It’s bad for your health.” Each time I think it’s the last, and each time I’m wrong, I thought. When I mentioned it to Surya, though—we hadn’t started sessions again yet, but he would come in morning and night to check my aura at the same time Kaninjer was checking my body—he just said, as predictably as the sun rising, “Don’t worry, everything’s going as it should. They will stop when you are finished.”

Everyone came to visit, of course, including Esora-e, who came beaming, “My Champion of the People.” They hadn’t decided for certain, but that was the buzz. At least he didn’t grill me about the duel, a mercy; the second night on the concussion regimen had left my mood, I confess, truly foul.

Even Chosaiya came, though I’d thought she was finished with me, at least until the Assembly re-approval vote. “I want you to be my semanakraseye for the next fifty years,” she said, when I asked why. “And the trial of the street and the dinner-table isn’t over. Champion of the People or not, you’re going to need all the help you can get.”

To the Committee, of course, I’d have to explain everything, but Kaninjer classed that as work. Likewise serving as witness in court; Senjalias had been charged with assisting in murder. It was I who’d have to tell them it had been a little more complicated than that, being the only other living witness who’d seen it all.

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