182 - I deserve to live

This time they’ll lock me up and throw away the key, I thought, when I woke up in Surya’s office and remembered the night before. Who could blame them? I’d not only said I’d kill myself, but death-threatened, with Chirel in my hand, anyone who tried to stop me, meaning even Yeolis, him, dearest friends, kin, anyone. I’d kissed off the semanakraseyesin too, the moment the Committee found out. Probably my healer, too; I couldn’t imagine him keeping me as a client after this.

For some reason, none of it mattered. I had a feeling which I can’t think how to describe except as a kind of internal smoothness, that I had never felt before.

I had no inclination to get up; one gets up to do things, and what was there for me to do? So I lay still, enjoying the feeling, and waiting for Surya and my spouses and Kaneka, or whoever, to come in and inform me that I had lost my freedom forever. Even the thought of the soft ropes pinching my wrists and elbows and ankles, for the rest of my life, didn’t bother me. I accept everything.

It was Surya alone who came, though, and instead of informing me of anything, he sat on the stool beside the bed, looked at my aura, and asked me the question that always seemed absurd, when he asked it at the same time he was aura-gazing: “How are you?”

“I’m fine.” Had I apologized to him last night? I thought I remembered it, but I wasn’t sure. I asked him.

“Yes, you did,” he said. “After you came back, you were so cold your head was not clear, that’s why you don’t remember it. I answered that I knew it was the death-in-you, not you, so I wouldn’t hold it against you.”

By the light from the window, the sun was well up. I sat up, testing my muscles; mostly they ached dully. “Whatever happens, I accept,” I said.

“I know,” he said, pointing out to me that it was even more absurd for me to answer the absurd question. “Only thing I’m wondering is how we explain the, em… ragged haircut.”

I stared at him. “There is a choice other than the truth?”

“As far as anyone knows,” he said, “you had an unusually severe session with me and slept here because of that. That’s what I told Skorsas last night.”

I couldn’t believe what I’d heard. “You are willing to cover it up?”

“Virani-e,” he said. “Tell me what’s in your heart.”

“Other than it almost stopping with astonishment? I… I’m not sure. I learned last night I am still asa kraiya enough that I can’t put a sword into flesh, even my own. What’s in my heart…?” There was something pushing to be voiced, suddenly. I asked myself, what is in that pushing? I found myself looking back over the shape of my life since I had begun with him.

“What strikes me, when I think about it—and it angers me, a little, tell the truth—is how much shame and pain I’ve been through. Why has it been so much? You’ve said always that my healing is a short version of my life, and it’s true; when I think about it, my life has been shot through with these things, too.”

Sharper anger out of nowhere seized my tongue. It was partly the look on his face; there was an odd eagerness to it, that seem callous when I was speaking of my own suffering. “Always shame and pain,” I said. “Why so much? I got stuck through the lung, a worse wound than I’ve had even in war. A vengeance-crazed stripling who’s a pissant of a duelist gave me most of the pinking death. I went completely mad for a while from remembering my stream-test. A Committee of Assembly was formed to dig through the entrails of my soul, one of them accused me of lying so much I demanded they truth-drug me and is still shitting on my name, I got dragged in front of a judge trussed up, and then in front of the Arch-Arbitrate, then flogged to falling, I’ve had warriors who were my friends publicly call me a traitor, I live limited—I can’t spar, I can’t swim, I can’t fly, I can’t be alone. And everything else in between!

“All through, you’ve been saying ‘Everything is going as it should’—so why was it that I should suffer so much? I know how each of these things is a reflection of something in my life. The wound, all my wounds; Younger Riji, the Mezem; the Committee and the courts, the chains a semanakraseye wears; remembering the stream-test, the stream-test itself. Why did I deserve it? What did I do, what in Hayel is so wrong with me? What true crime did I commit?”

I sprang up and faced him square on. My feet seemed a handwidth off the floor. He stared at me, with too happy an expression for what I was saying, making me angrier; yet there was somehow the joy of freedom in it. For once, I’m not going to worry whether my words are polite. For once, I’m going to say what I kyashin well please. Where this all was coming from, I had no idea, but it had too much force to be denied.

“You know what, Surya Chaelaecha? I don’t think I did commit so terrible a crime. I have never done anything but my best, either for duty or love. I have just been one person, one soul, struggling to make the best of what I was given, same as everyone else, even if I had so many more people watching and judging than most. I was born with the blessings and the curses I was born with, same as everyone else, and I’ve tried to do right wherever I could, and made mistakes because I am only human—same as everyone else. So why do I suffer so? It’s wrong! It’s unjust!

“So—last night I told you I was canceling the relinquishment; I say it again this morning, though for better reason. Kyash on this business of not being competent in matters of my life and death; I’m perfectly cursed competent. You order me to do something that looks like it’s going to end up with me hurt or shamed, Surya, I will just refuse. If I’ve lost a healer, fine. I don’t need one!”

The part of me that could not believe what I was saying faded. The words poured out of some very deep place, proving its existence to me, like lava from a cleft in the earth no one knew was there. I saw the flash in one of Surya’s eyes, of a tear. What was he kyashin crying about?

“I take back my will for good! I make my choices from now on, all of them, and I’m done with shame and pain and living the life of the living dead. I’m done with thinking I should be punished with death just for being who I am! I deserve better than that, and curse it—I always have! I deserve better than Linasika Aramichiya’s calls for my impeachment, I deserve better than the smears about my sanity or that I overstepped, I deserve better than death at Sharaina Anina’s filthy hands—I deserve better even than death at my own filthy asakraiyaseyeni hands! I deserve to live, damn it; my body has always known it, just as you say. Well, my body is fikken right! I don’t deserve to die! I deserve to live, damn it, I deserve to live! I deserve to live! I deserve to—”

I froze. Surya was grinning helplessly, tears spilling over his cheeks.

†

I sat down hard on the bed.

“Say it,” he said.

“I deserve to live.”

He laid his hands on me in the way that is the auric healer’s truth-drug. “I deserve to live… you must not really be doing it, Surya; that was too easy. Really do it.”

“Second Fire come if I lie,” he said, his voice quivering, “I am really doing it.”

“I deserve to live,” I said. “I deserve to live. I deserve to live.”

“Aside from the ceremony, you’re done.”

I sat down on the bed again, and sat utterly still, feeling I deserve to live spread out from my core, a ripping sensation through all my muscles, aching along the life-energy lines. My every cell embraced it, like warmth when you have been dying of cold. Same as with the warmth, the effect was total, and I knew I need never go back, so long as I chose, just as one may choose to be in warmth.

Surya watched in awestruck silence. I imagine a person’s aura, as they undergo such a change, must be a spectacular thing.

I lay down and wept, in part from relief, and in part from the emotion that just comes from the immensity of it all. The tears were like rain that leaves the earth clean.

“You saw this coming, as you see everything coming,” I said finally, “and that’s why you were willing to keep secret what I did last night.”

“It would be so wrong for you to be treated like a suicide now,” he said. I laid my head on my crossed wrists and wept a little more.

“Why,” I said when I could, “when this was about to happen... was I seized with the urge to give up?”

“Because that’s how it always goes, with everyone. I knew you would despair entirely, or at least seem to yourself to be despairing entirely, just before you touched the finish post. I told you there was one last monster; that was it.”

“You were certain I wouldn’t do it?”

He let out a long sigh. No point in pretending to myself I hadn’t been a trial to him. With any luck he’d never have a case like me again. “No. You were perfectly safe from yourself on the mountain, even if you intended anything but. At the same time—it can be hard to believe. With you flinging those words at me with the sword in your hand and with so much death and agony in your aura, yes, I was worried. I am human. Our learning is never finished.”

“Surya was unsure,” I punned on his name, and we both laughed. “I don’t know how to begin to thank you.”

“You’re paid up.”

“Surya—!”

“Are you forgetting, what I have done for you is my work?”

“Right. I forget, what is mind-shattering and life-altering for all your patients is just every day for you.”

“You can do one thing for me,” he said, and did the auric-truth-drug touch on me again. “Let me hear it. As many times as you are inclined. Just… so I hear it.”

“I deserve to live,” I said. “I deserve to live, I deserve to live, I deserve to live…” I kept saying it until I couldn’t keep from laughing, and then we were both laughing, laughing and crying at once.

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