Yethyr was overwhelmed by the cacophony that I could always hear. Stonesong beneath his sleeping bag. Windsong flapping at the tent. Firesong from the campfire beyond. Awe. Worshipful awe filled him.
He could hear me, too.
In panic, I fragmented my thoughts, becoming a torrent of confused emotions and imagery. I was just a naive sword, trying to help. Let that be all that he knew. Let that be what he focused on. I could not let him know me; I could not let him take my will.
He believed I was trying to communicate in the garbled way he thought I was limited to. “Use my words if you can’t use your own,” he suggested gently, and there was a novelty in his permission to masquerade his thoughts.
“Help,” I said in his voice. “The sword is trying to help.” I needed him to believe that.
“I know,” Yethyr believed readily. “You’re trying to heal me.”
“Trying,” I echoed. My frustration became known to him, and so did my ignorance. I had not wanted that, but there was nothing to be done about it now. I doubled down. Let that ignorance be a shield. Let him think me innocent. Let him think I am malleable.
“Trying to learn.” I deliberately focused on my brief, violent life and its notable lack of people surviving their wounds. “Don’t know how.”
I fixated on the problem, trying to explain through sensation and song that I was studying how my body—his body—healed. Yethyr was an attentive listener. In moments, he understood my conundrum.
“You need examples,” he recommended reasonably. “Smaller, quick healing wounds. Opportunities to practice.”
An idea came, and we were so linked it was unclear if it came from him or me.
“Mandorias, give me your needle.”
The scholar frowned, but handed it over obediently. Yethyr took the needle like it was perfectly natural and casually poked himself in the thumb till he bled.
“Master!” Mandorias snatched the needle back in horror. “Be careful!”
“It’s only a prick!” Yethyr protested. He looked up, distracted from our bond, and I used that moment to shut him out. He was too startled to stop me, and I was relieved.
So I could push him out of my thoughts after all, just as he could push me out of his body.
Equal and not.
A stalemate and not.
I calmed down. Now that he was out, I could afford to think clearly. I hadn’t thought anything incriminating while he was listening. In fact, I may have actually gained more than he did. In the excitement of our communion, he had forgotten to try to dominate me. He had helped me instead.
I focused on the little prick on his thumb. The break in the skin was so small that it stopped bleeding only after a few minutes, a scab already forming.
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I watched the formation intently. Mandorias left the tent, and I barely noticed. Yethyr tried to enter my thoughts again, but withdrew when he felt me recoil. He knew now what I was trying to do and wisely left me be.
Without Yethyr’s interruptions, I could watch his thumb become faintly inflamed and then listen to the faint intricate concert of watersong and stonesong in his body craft new skin to grow over the puncture. Internalizing the musical construction, I experimented with speeding it up, seeing how fast I could make the tempo before the music broke down. It was a delicate balance, but rewarding.
After an hour, I had completely healed his thumb. I was giddy. It was such a small thing, not a real achievement at all, and yet I felt such triumph.
“That’s remarkable work,” Yethyr admired his thumb. He glanced around to make sure no one was watching and then discreetly pricked a different finger with the point of my famously cursed blade.
For practice.
After a couple of hours of practice, I determined many things. Chief among them: good blood flow was critical for good healing, and Yethyr’s circulation was terrible.
At first, I didn’t understand why. Spryne had cursed his bones, not his blood, but after listening to the trickle of watersong in his veins for a few more hours, I understood.
The skeleton and blood flow of a human being were linked. The blood around Yethyr’s dead and deteriorating bones stagnated in ways that healthier parts of him didn’t.
Everything in the body was linked, I was beginning to realize, more intricate and coordinated than the most advanced Datrean choir.
And Yethyr’s bones were an entire section out of tune, throwing off the whole song. Spryne was not just bringing him closer to death; Spryne was sickening the life that he did have.
Another thing to blame that demon for.
For the moment, though, Yethyr’s veins were mine, and I found that I could force blood to pump where it clearly was supposed to go. I focused on the wound in his shoulder and got to work, carefully orchestrating the tempo of his body’s circulation to go faster. The wound began to itch, but Yethyr made no complaint. He lay down in his sleeping bag, passive and patient, and did not disturb me.
He trusted me with this.
I did not know how to feel about that, so I didn’t. The work absorbed me. I became deaf to the rest of the world. I was having fun, I realized dimly. Regrowing the skin on his shoulder was a monotonous, complex, exhausting labor, and I had never had so much fun in my life.
I was a sword. I had never been able to do anything that wasn’t killing before. Doing this, undoing a wound I made, it felt good. I was fixing something. I was making something. It was a task that I could do; it was a task that mattered, and it wasn’t killing. It was the opposite. This was creation itself written as small as could be. Each new particle of skin grown was art, my art, a craft all my own.
I loved it.
It made sense, I supposed. I was born from the minds of blacksmiths. It was only natural that I liked to tinker.
Yethyr’s body was no beautiful ironwork, but it could be hammered into shape just the same. I happily worked at it through the night, carefully constructing his skin, grain by grain. The rhythmic tedium reminded me of my makers’ work back in the forge. There was even a bit of steelsong hiding in Yethyr’s blood.
Iron.
Discovering such a beautiful metal in Yethyr’s wasted body felt like finding treasure in mud. I wanted to sing to it, as my father would have done, and so I hummed as I worked. The voices of the steelsingers within me rose up and Yethyr’s blood danced to steelsong rhythms.
I rejoiced at its response. My metal brothers had never heard me before, deaf to my deathsong voice, but what allowed me to speak to whoever touched me clearly extended to the minute metals in their blood. Iron, copper, zinc…it went on and on. Trace amounts of over a dozen metals danced to my humming. Their reaction emboldened me; I sang louder. They were wordless lullabies, nearly meaningless, and yet Yethyr listened in rapt attention.
Distantly, I could hear Wes singing with me, a ways beyond the tent. We were both in the frequency of deathsong, wrong for the blacksmith choir we were invoking, but it didn’t matter. For a few hours, the memory of the siege and the loss fell away and we were back in the forge again. Wes and I were family again, no conflict between us. I could pretend I was just another smith and not a sword that had been forced to butcher them all.
I pretended to be a smith all through the night.
By the next morning, Yethyr’s shoulder was healed, and the thralls were gone.
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What's your favorite metal in the human body?
