Her fingers pressed down on the leg. For a moment, her hand, the mixture and the Gnome’s flesh become one element. When Amarita took her fingers away, the gash was sewn together with tiny strands of vine.
Finally, she turned around and looked up at me.
“All right, kid. How about you take me home?”
As we walked, Amarita gave me a brief rundown of her history. She grew up in the Farra Glades which was a lush rainforest filled with other Wood Nymphs. A decade ago, she became interested in merging the medicines of her people with other healing techniques from around the world. When her travels introduced her to Hendricks, they bonded over their desires to look past the existing prejudices of their people. Amarita helped out the Opus with their medical training and then Hendricks suggested that Sunder might benefit from her expertise and enthusiasm. She agreed, becoming the first of her kind to try to mend a bridge that had been burned, broken, stuffed into a cannon and blasted off over the moon.
She spoke so fast it felt like someone was counting down the time she had to talk. Her arguments shone like well-used weapons that sharpened themselves every time she brought them out to play. I hitched on to her conversation like it was the back of a runaway train and tried not to give away my ignorance.
We walked and I watched her mouth and wondered if I’d ever be as sure of anything as she was of everything. She held the world in her fingertips and tore it apart. Ripped strips off the language like it was rare steak and picked the politics from her teeth.
It wasn’t the first time I’d been over-my-head in understanding the magical world. I was used to feeling dumb, but this was different. She made me feel like a child. She turned the world in her hands to show me sides I’d never seen and stuffed light into the dark little cracks of my mind. I was a better man from the moment I saw her.
“Of course there’s not enough money for a hospital. There’s never enough money for anything but they don’t have a choice. From what I saw today, it’s clear that the medical center can’t handle the expansion of the city and the only solution is an updated and fully funded public facility. If we don’t do something soon, every creature in the slums will be eaten up by bugs, flu and infection.”
“So, you plan on spending every second of the day convincing him to build the hospital?”
“Almost. Priority number one is getting everyone out of that valley. The slums are below sea level. It might take fifty years, or it might come tomorrow, but if enough rainfall hits those mountains, we won’t have time to evacuate.”
Thousands of people all crammed together between sheet-metal and cinder-blocks, and she wanted the Governor to find a way to shift them. How do you begin to break that puzzle apart if you don’t have the funding to put it back together?
She looked up at me and laughed. Every time she did that there were a few more notes inside.
“You’re clenching your teeth again, kid. Go home and get yourself clean. You know where to find me. Come back if you want to do some good.”
I’d been so wrapped up in our conversation that I hadn’t noticed where we were. An Ogre guard opened up the gates to the Governor’s mansion as Amarita turned and entered them. She skipped up the perfect set of stone steps, through the overflowing garden of exotic flowers, and paused at the front door. The marble sparkled under the rising moon. So did she.
She looked over her shoulder and gave me a look so hot it nearly fried a butterfly that flew between us.
And I was done.
While Hendricks was away, I served as guide and bodyguard to Amarita Quay (or Amari, as I started to call her) many times. When Hendricks returned, he also moved into the mansion. Every couple of nights, I was invited up to the garden to join them all for dinner and energized discussion.
Governor Lark was an old Ogre, shorter than most of his kind, whose beard and hair had become a single, bushy beast. His tusks pointed up to his wrinkled cheeks and were polished to an embarrassingly perfect shine. He had a penchant for fur and would adorn his shoulders with dead creatures that he professed to have hunted himself, though I never really believed him.
I ate better than I ever had in my life but the conversation mostly escaped my understanding. Amari fought for her hospital, Lark blustered back, and Hendricks played the man in the middle. I just watched, amazed that I’d been invited into an inner circle of articulate, charismatic decision-makers. I was in awe of them. Even Lark, who didn’t understand why I was there or include me more than he needed to, still had his undeniable charms. It is a rare privilege to be in the presence of geniuses. Even rarer for them to know your name. For them to be kind to you. To care.
Over the next two years, Hendricks and Amari came and left. Whenever Hendricks arrived in town, he would come by The Ditch to tell me stories of his adventures. When Amari was here, I helped her with her plans for the hospital. We also drank and we talked. We kissed, a couple of times, but it always felt like we were on the verge of something more. At least to me.
It was best when it was all of us and worst when I was alone. When Amari left, I would feel physically ill for a week. The common jobs that allowed me to survive in Sunder would feel like punishments. Where once I’d been happy to be the naïve, uneducated errand boy, now it seemed pathetic.
When she was here, I felt anxious. When she was gone, I felt trapped. I was in love. The next time Hendricks came to town, he saw it right away.
We were walking the streets on a summer night and Hendricks was telling me a piece of history I’d already heard twice before. Usually his descriptions were entertaining enough to enjoy a repeat performance but my mind was wandering. He noticed. So, he changed the topic to something he knew would snap me to attention.
“Amarita will be here next week.”
Even if he hadn’t been watching me closely, my reaction was impossible to miss. I went from exhausted to exhilarated in a second. Hendricks smiled, but there was something sad in his eyes.
“Fetch, I hope you don’t think me presumptuous, but I must admit that I worry about you. Your upbringing, from what you’ve told me, was quite different to those of us on the outside. You have strange customs. Different values. I have been thinking on it, and I believe it might have something to do with your shorter life spans. You cling to things. There is a possessiveness to your culture that, I imagine, will take longer for you to shake than a couple of years in the wild. And Amari, she is… well, she’s a forest spirit. A piece of nature brought to life. She’s…”
He looked up at me and something in my expression gave him pause. Maybe he sensed how much I hated him in that moment. It was ridiculous, of course. He had known Amari far longer than I had. He knew her world. They’d spent months on the road together, saving lives and walking through warzones. But I already believed that Amari and I shared something precious and entirely unique. I felt that I understood her in a way that nobody else ever could. So for anyone, even my dearest friend, to try to tell me something about her that I didn’t already know, it cut straight through to my deepest, most terrifying fear. That perhaps I didn’t know her at all.
I didn’t say anything. To his credit, neither did he. He just put a hand on my shoulder and we kept on walking and I did my best to push down the indignant anger that was curdling in my stomach.