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CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

Elician

E lician is not used to being alone.

There has always been someone there. Lio, for all his life; Marina, for most of it; his other guards (often serving on rotation at his father’s or uncle’s orders); Fen, who has been chasing his heels since the day she was born and who he had loved even before she had been adopted. Adalei too; she had been his constant correspondent and confidant. His parents and the courtiers at Himmelsheim had also always been present – all of them had filled the empty spaces of his periphery from the moment he first drew breath. True periods of isolation had been few and far between, confined to segments of his life where piety or official obligation had taken precedence. Even when he wanted to be alone, he had never actually been alone. Someone had always stood at the door to his bedroom or lurked in the corners of the hallways, watching for any sign of trouble. To be alone, he’d needed to pretend they weren’t there.

He does not need to pretend here.

The room Gillage put him in is brighter than the Reaper cells. He can see the sun. He can feel the wind against his fingers if he holds his hand up to the open window. He can hear movement outside. But the door to his room is always closed and there is never a face to accompany such noises. Even in the cages he had that much. Here, there is never another presence to reflect his own emotions. Whole days pass without any form of human contact. When it comes, it comes in the form of harsh hands and belligerent lackeys who are more interested in standing by and waiting for Gillage’s strange doctor to finish her work.

Eline is nothing like the physician that used to care for his cousin at the House of the Unwanting. Eline is not kind or ethical in her ministrations. She is not conscientious about her experiments, nor does she care how he feels at the end of her inquiries. She sheared his curls sometime after his first month in the room, curious to see how fast he could make them grow back, and was annoyed when the pace was slower than she liked. And shamefully, despite that, Elician has learned to look forward to Eline’s arrival. Because as exhausting and painful and terrifying as her inquiries are, at least it means that – for a short while – he will not be alone.

The click-clacking of her heels always precedes her presence. The moment he hears them, he crawls out from under the bed he has been given and stands facing the door. She enters with a great sweep of fabric – her skirts elegant and full, far wider and more voluminous than the slim fashions of Soleb. Yet the cloth is equally as intricate and detailed in its weave and patterns. The colours are also vibrant and glorious. He finds himself getting distracted by their hues – bright yellows, oranges or greens – as she speaks.

‘Your friend is doing well,’ she tells him, baiting him with information while simultaneously reinforcing a threat.

‘How do I know you’re telling the truth?’ he asks her anyway, dancing the steps she has choreographed.

‘Let me think . . . what did he tell me this time? Oh, yes, he said your favourite place in Himmelsheim was a rooftop parapet, and you needed to climb the walls in order to reach it. Hand, please?’ He holds out his hand and she slices it open with a concealed scalpel. He flinches, feeling the blade slice all the way down to his bones. Tissue splits, muscle tears, and blood flows from his palm in a great gush.

She snaps her fingers and a young girl in a pretty golden dress hurries in with a chair and the lap desk. Eline sits, still watching his hand bleed. She watches until the moment it stops bleeding too – as the skin pieces itself back together, a bruise forms beneath the fresh tissue, and then that too dissipates just as fast. Hastily, she writes her notes. ‘Fetch a bowl, Lisène.’ The girl hurries out, then hurries back in. ‘Hold that,’ Eline commands Elician, who takes it clumsily, nerves taking their time reconnecting. She tosses him the scalpel, grins. ‘Do it again, into the bowl, please.’

He could kill her. He could kill her and the girl and probably the guard at his door with this knife, but he would not get far. Eventually he would be overpowered. And when that happened . . .

He sits on the bed, the misshapen, uncomfortable bed that isn’t even worth sleeping on properly. He balances the bowl on his knees, holds his hand over it and cuts. Blood drains from him into the bowl, and he leans back against the wall to wait until Eline is satisfied. He liked it better when she had been testing the effects of starvation on a Giver. Liked it better, too, when she cut down his curls and made it so he couldn’t even play with the ends whenever boredom threatened to overcome him entirely. At least when she did those things, he did not have to be a part of it. At least then it wasn’t his hand wielding the blade.

Elician loses consciousness at some point. He does not remember when. His body is whole, as always, when he wakes – but the bowl is gone and the moon is at the window, a chill in the air. His back aches painfully after the hours spent slumped awkwardly on the bed. He shuffles off it, onto the floor, curling up in the dark.

The bed in this room is broken, misshapen. There are no pillows, nor is there a mattress. The boards that make up the base pitch inwards towards the middle, and this design appears to be intentional. Painful. It is a joke. It offers an illusion of something but denies it utterly. He cannot lie on it without discomfort. And worse discomfort faces him when he wakes. At least the floor is flat.

There, beneath the horrid bedframe, he imagines himself at home. Hiding beneath his bed on purpose. Drawing pictures on the underside with stolen paints and inks. He imagines chasing fireflies with Lio, and when the thought of his friend hurts too much, he thinks of Adalei. Of sitting with her at Kreuzfurt, talking to her as she plotted her next weaving pattern.

The finest gift Lio had ever given Adalei was a loom he had built himself. Elician had played the role of an informant, and he went back and forth between Lio and Adalei, questioning both and trying to squirrel away answers from each of them to make sure Lio had the correct specifications he needed. When the pieces were prepared, Elician drafted his mother to ensure that Adalei was away from her room long enough for them to assemble it.

She cried when she saw it. Cried and ran her hands over the carefully sanded wood. Later, Elician still worked on his lessons by her side, but he timed his reading to the sound of her throwing her shuttle to the left and right, making patterns out of glorious, vivid colour.

In the emptiness of his room, Elician can almost conjure up the sound of the shuttle as it moves. The whoosh of the beater as it swings this way and that. The calming familiarity of quiet days spent in simple contemplation. If Adalei were here now, Elician thinks, she would have a ten-point plan for how to most effectively manage her circumstances. She is the only person Elician knows who can retain her quiet poise and grace even in the most perilous of situations, keeping her back straight and her chin up. Gorgeous in her satins and silks.

‘What a load of horse shit,’ Elician says to the ceiling. He presses his hands to his eyes. If Adalei were here now, she would be terrified out of her mind, and he would not blame her one bit. Adalei likes order and logic. She likes patterns and sequences she can depend on. She likes strategy and managing expectations. Nothing about his present circumstances allows him to indulge in such things. She would have been homicidal by the second day, and wholly unrepentant and unforgiving after she fully came to appreciate the conditions in the Reaper cells. She and Lio were well suited in that regard. All of Alelune would fall to her wrath if she saw the injustices he’s seen here – and Elician must scrub his mind with a figurative rag to force his thoughts away from his cousin’s temper.

It is not easy. His only form of entertainment is to sleep and sleeping leads to dreaming. Dreaming leads back to Adalei, Lio, Fen and home. Dreams lead back to memories of a lost Alelune prince, curled against his side at a fire, leaning close as Elician points out every constellation he knows. Round and round his brain runs, pulling up new memories and old – sometimes perverting them into twisted nightmares or outlandish curios that have little logic and offer even less relaxation.

Heels click in the hall. Eline. Again. Elician drags himself out to meet her. ‘The first person you ever brought back to life was Lio,’ she says, skipping straight to business. ‘Lie down, please?’ He winces but does as he is told. He lies down on the tortuous bed, hating how his spine bends and aches and his muscles whine in protest. A bowl is placed on the floor beneath his arm. She carves open his artery and he closes his eyes, waiting to die. Again. He wakes intermittently throughout the remainder of the day. Blurred images cross this way and that in front of his face.

He sees her drop a dead mouse into the bowl filled with his blood. Hears her pen scratching against paper on the lap desk. He does not see her results, but hears her say, ‘Fascinating . . .’ He dies. Wakes up. She is leaving as his eyes open, and his head is still far too dizzy.

‘Can I have something to read?’ he asks, slurring half the words. Eline hesitates by the door.

‘You want to read ?’ she asks him.

‘Don’t care what.’ He is going to lose consciousness again soon. ‘Just boring . . . here . . .’

When he wakes up again, hours later, there is a book on the floor by the bed. A complete history of Alelune. It is not what he had expected.

He reads it anyway.

Growing up, there were times when Elician’s father called for family time . Lio was released from his duties to go home with his parents. And Elician found himself sitting in his father’s solarium, swinging his legs miserably as he waited for something entertaining to happen. If this took too long, and if they were finally given permission to touch, he would let Adalei aggressively plait his curls in whichever style was the current fashion. He would rather have been reading or writing, and she would rather have been at her loom. But his mother, the Queen, insisted such things were work and that they deserved a break. She never did like that Adalei enjoyed weaving in the first place. That was a task for paid labourers, not for ladies .

Reading about Alelune is almost as tragically entertaining as family time . The learned historian who penned this illustrious tale must have been the least popular member of his academic society. His prose leaves much to be desired and his expressions are dismal. Elician had hoped for something that would infuriate him into an emotion besides his ever-present ennui, and he achieves it. The text is vile, and he spends quite a few lovely hours imagining stuffing page upon page of it down the author’s throat. He considers, briefly, doing it to Gillage, but he shies away from the idea quickly enough. He has not quite devolved into fantasizing about brutalizing children just yet. Even if Gillage is slowly inching his way towards the age of majority.

‘The pretentiousness alone is enough to strangle a nation,’ Elician informs a spider that has crawled through his window to avoid the brisk chill of the outside world. It is a good-sized fellow with long legs and a threatening mark on its back. Elician imagines it would hurt quite a lot to get bitten by it. He keeps to his side of the room and expects the spider to honour their truce by keeping to the window and the window alone. But Elician has also been raised with manners. He acknowledges his temporary roommate and discusses his research as much as he deems appropriate. ‘Listen to this.’ Elician clears his throat and adopts a particularly affected accent to read, ‘“Her Holiness, the Graceful Alerina of Nuvola, ascended to the glorious throne of the heavens with ninety-three years of her life spent in dedicated and committed service to the people of Alelune. Her Holiness, the Graceful Alerina of Nuvola, was blessed with fourteen glorious children, ten of whom remained earnestly committed to the War with Soleb, setting aside their own potential prospects in their personal lives to commit themselves wholly and without exception to the glory of Alelune.” It’s tripe !’ Elician kicks the bedpost.

The spider does not move and likely is not paying attention. ‘It’s repetitious, redundant, reprehensible and wrong .’ Elician waves the book towards the spider as if to get his point across. ‘“For the betterment of the country, Her Holiness gathered and confined all the Reapers in the land, preventing their loathsome presence from tainting her people to ensure the proper longevity of her nation. No Givers have been born in Alelune following this decree, ensuring that all of Alelune is an honest and pure country with no insidious perversions of humanity amongst their populace.” Except that’s statistically impossible ,’ Elician grumbles. ‘The only reason they do not exist is because they do not let themselves be known!’

There’s a shuffling by the door and Elician looks up as it opens, expecting Gillage or Eline – readying himself for another of their semi-frequent bouts of medical experimentation. Instead, he finds himself peering at a tall, stocky fellow with a shaved head and a guard’s uniform. His brown eyes squint in what can only be described as confusion and, grudgingly, Elician feels a bit ashamed of his spider/history-induced outbursts. He runs a hand over the short hair that still feels wrong after years of having it hang past his shoulders. He tries to make it look good or presentable, to make himself look less like a madman, as the guard asks, ‘Who are you talking to?’ and peers around the room as if someone might magically appear.

And Elician is forced to point to his eight-legged roommate with as much stoicism as he can manage. The guard follows his finger and winces at the sight of the creature. ‘It’s not so bad,’ Elician suggests, voice cracking. ‘Though I admit I’d prefer a mouse.’

‘A mouse?’

‘They do more . . . and are softer if you want to pet it.’ Elician waves his hand as if that could sum it all up, and the guard tilts his head in consideration for a moment before shrugging and closing the door once again. ‘Hey! Is someone always standing out there?’ Elician calls out, feeling his heart pick up its pace once more. It’s several long moments before he gets a reply.

‘I’m out here every day,’ the guard says quietly, but just loudly enough to be heard. Elician scrambles to his feet. He places his hands on the wooden frame of the doorway. His breaths come faster and faster. The guard goes on to say, ‘You can talk if you need to.’

I’m not alone, Elician realizes suddenly. He laughs a touch hysterically at the absurdity of it all. Then he crouches by the doorway, leans his back against the wall and starts to speak.

He has not nearly finished complaining about his book yet.

The guard’s name is Jonan Morsen, and sometimes – when Elician misses home more than breath itself – Morsen tells him stories too. They are silly stories for the most part. Stories about lost shopping lists and trips to the market. Watching festival days and old school remembrances. Once, Morsen spins a tale of a lady beautiful enough to make the world stop spinning as it watched her move, it being fascinated by the sway of her hips and the steps her feet took as she danced.

Elician presumes this lady is Morsen’s wife, but all he can think of is sweet Adalei and how Lio once tried his best to say such lovely things about her too. Love, Elician thinks, is a game of repetition that replays the same narrative again and again.

‘Your friend said you were a poet,’ Morsen chastises through the door after a particularly fierce bout of complaining from Elician.

‘My friend . . . Lio? You have seen Lio?’ Elician croaks, pressing himself as close as he can to the door.

‘When I’m not here, I’m assigned to the cells. I pass him on my rounds.’

‘And he’s well? He’s still alive?’

‘He’s well,’ Morsen replies. ‘Young. How old is he?’

Twenty-three, Elician almost says. He doesn’t. He thinks back. Tries to remember the number of days that have passed since they left Soleb, since they were separated, since . . . ‘How long have we been here?’ he asks.

‘Nearing nine months.’

‘Oh.’ Elician squeezes his eyes shut. Which means – ‘Twenty-four.’ He clears his throat. It hurts to speak. ‘Lio . . . Lio’s twenty-four now.’ And that means – ‘My sister’s fifteen.’ She will be a woman soon. When she turns sixteen, she will be given her first lessons in leadership. If she hadn’t been a Giver, she would have been sent to the front as a new recruit. Instead, perhaps a wing in the House of the Wanting would be given to her, as a privilege of her birthright. And Cat . . . Alest . Is he twenty-one now? Almost twenty-two, maybe? Marina will have taught him much by now. Or maybe he has not wanted to learn, and spends his days sleeping, warm and content, blissful in the knowledge that he is safe and cannot be harmed anymore. That sounds nice.

‘Someone’s coming,’ Morsen warns softly, and Elician stands. He drags himself to the horrible excuse for a bed and sits down awkwardly on the edge where some of the angles aren’t as extreme. The door opens and Eline steps in. Her entourage drags someone in behind her. A trembling, pitiful speck of humanity dressed in a tattered tunic, its laces undone, with torn trousers that are cut off at the knee. Another person is pushed in afterwards, covered from head to toe in thick fabric so not one slice of skin is bared. A Reaper.

‘Stand there,’ Eline orders. The Reaper crosses around to Elician’s other side and waits. The prisoner is shoved to his knees between them. ‘Touch his skin, Elician.’

‘Prince,’ Elician corrects her, staring at the man. Eline waits for his cooperation, squinting down at him dispassionately. Sighing, Elician does as he is bid. He places his palm on the prisoner’s arm. Closing his eyes, he settles into the familiar sensation of feeling another person’s life in his hand.

The prisoner has a few injuries. Skinned knees. Frayed vocal cords from screaming. Elician grimaces as he heals them all. Shock lines the prisoner’s face and he tries to pull away, screaming, ‘No! Stop – not you !’ Elician flinches, releasing the man even as Eline’s enforcers also shove the prisoner closer.

‘Touch him again.’

He does, wilfully ignoring the way the man flinches and twitches. ‘It’s not like I asked to be your cultural taboo,’ Elician mutters as the prisoner sobs.

‘Do not let go,’ Eline orders, then she turns to the Reaper. ‘You. Touch him.’ Elician tries not to feel too offended when the prisoner does not seem nearly as horrified by the idea of instantaneous death as he is by Elician’s far less lethal contact. The Reaper approaches slowly, glancing awkwardly at Elician, who shrugs in return. He has never been party to something like this before and has no idea what is going to happen. He has a feeling that no one, apart from Eline perhaps, will enjoy it all that much.

The Reaper slowly bares a small strip of skin just on their hand. They reach out, pressing the gap to the prisoner’s arm, and the man throws his head back in a wordless wail. His eyes stare vacantly at the ceiling. Elician feels the moment the man dies, the way his soul leaves his body, his heart stopping and his brain function ending. A wriggle of discomfort wraps around Elician’s mind, and he feels a shiver rattle down his spine. His stomach clenches in anticipation as his own fingers tighten on the prisoner’s arm.

He knows it is hard for most Givers to bring someone back from the dead. That they struggle to pull a soul back from the beyond. But Elician has never needed anything more than a touch, a slight press of skin. It is as instantaneous as a Reaper’s touch in reverse. Zinnitzia had called him a prodigy. Marina had fretted. Fen, even with all her magnificent talent, still needed a few moments of time. A few moments of prolonged contact to entertain the possibility of cheating Death.

He hates this experiment more than anything else. He cannot control it. The prisoner is now tethered between him and a Reaper, and Elician cannot stop the urge to make this man live no matter what the cost. He feels the man’s blood moving through his body. He feels sharp pricks of electricity igniting in the man’s brain, trying to do something, trying to return to normalcy. And with each physical response that sparks and pulsates, marking the return of life , he senses the opposite – the swift and sharp finality of death swatting back.

The Reaper’s presence blankets Elician’s ministrations, smothering and enveloping them. It’s a heady reminder that Elician is the air that fuels the fire of this prisoner’s existence. The touch of his skin is the spark that ignites that flame. But the moment Elician releases his hold, he knows that the Reaper’s blanketing influence will smother that flame entirely, Death winning out the moment Life cedes the field. And Elician cannot let go.

‘Fascinating,’ Eline says, taking notes on her ever-present stack of papers.

Elician spares a glance for the Reaper. His eyes have glazed over, lips trembling. His fingers are still holding tight to the prisoner’s arm, but the grasp seems almost desperate, as if this contact is causing him some kind of physical harm. Elician has directly touched Reapers before. Marina . . . Cat – Alest. He’d held Alest in his arms and never once felt this strange, sickening spiral deep in his chest. There had been no cosmic back and forth. Life and Death tugging on two ends. Touching Alest had made him think only: This must be what it’s like to feel human.

But with this prisoner held between him and this Reaper, Elician cannot help but feel the energy it takes to keep the prisoner alive. Elician has become the only thing capable of saving an unwilling man’s life.

Suddenly, the Reaper collapses, dropping to the side in a dead faint. The prisoner gasps, head falling forward as his chest rises and falls in a steady rhythm. Elician releases him. He looks down at the Reaper, wondering if he could or should try to rouse him back to consciousness. He doesn’t wonder for long.

Eline snaps her fingers. Orders, ‘Bring in the next one,’ and Elician’s head snaps towards the door. Another Reaper is being brought in. The unconscious body of her fellow is left where it fell. The prisoner starts babbling, shaking his head, trying to get away. The guards shove him back in place. Elician feels bile start to climb in his throat. He swallows, trying to ward off a wave of sickness.

‘Again,’ Eline orders.

Elician closes his eyes, presses his hand to the prisoner’s arm, and for the first time in his life thinks, I do not think you want to live anymore. But the prisoner’s body continues to fight to survive for every second Elician keeps his palm to the man’s skin. No matter what they do to him, or how many Reapers are brought into Elician’s room: the man keeps coming back to life.