“Right. Well, I brought these.” Rowan brandished the crutches before him and let the tote slide from his shoulder. “They’re adjustable, we can shorten them. They’ll allow you to get moving while your wound is still healing.” Aligning one of the crutches against Jonas and eying it for height, Rowan then swung it horizontal and rested it on one bent knee while he loosened a winged bolt halfway down the shaft. “How do your fellow Quavens look upon disabilities such as this?” Rowan’s tone was casual as he slid the two sections of the crutch together, making them a couple of inches shorter, then re-bolted them.

  “Not kindly,” Jonas said.

  “Still, being their Syakaran hero’s gotta give you some clemency,” said Rowan. He sighted the crutch against Jonas’s right armpit again, smiled to himself and relinquished the crutch into Jonas’s possession before turning to make the same adjustment to the other.

  Jonas grunted as he accepted the crutch and adjusted his grip, testing it for comfort. He hadn’t dared dwell too much on how the Quaven people might react to his powerlessness. Any time he’d let it cross his mind, there was no outcome in which they respected him or let Llew live free—if they let her live at all.

  Once again, the thought crossed his mind that Llew would be better off without him. She could move farther and faster and could quite easily have nothing to do with Quaver ever again.

  He leaned his armpit into the crutch. The irony that he would need to build new muscle memory when he was losing overall vigor wasn’t lost on him.

  Rowan held out the second shortened crutch, and Jonas raised his left arm to accept it and settled his weight into both, a forward lean giving him a 3-point base.

  Rowan stepped back, assessing Jonas’s balance. “You’ll get the hang of it.” He bent to open the tote bag. “I’ve also brought this.” He brandished a leg. It had a harness for attaching to a thigh and a foot that hung limp at the other end. Rowan stood, rotating the leg in his hands, displaying all its angles and articulations. “After Ma finished on the railway, I kept working on a few designs. This is the strongest and lightest of my above-the-knee models. We can only guess what sort of pressures a Syakaran such as yourself might put on it, but it’s a place to start, eh?” He manipulated the knee joint, rubbed a hand inside the bowl-shaped socket. “You’ll need to heal before we can fit it properly, but Ma tells me that won’t need to take so long as other folks.” Rowan glanced at Llew. “Still, I’ll need some time to make a few adjustments.” He leaned the prosthetic against the chair beside Jonas and pulled a coiled tape measure from his pocket. “Shall we measure?”

  Jonas shrugged. “Measure away.”

  Rowan stepped up close, easing Jonas back to a more perpendicular stance. Jonas wobbled on his foot, gripped his crutches tight and managed to stay upright.

  “Sorry,” Rowan said. “I’ll need a good straight line for the first few measurements.” Pressing fingers down on Jonas’s shoulders alternatively, Rowan stepped back to check the line. Satisfied, he stooped, stretched the tape from floor to Jonas’s armpit, made a note in a small notepad and duplicated the measure. He moved to Jonas’s other side to repeat the performance.

  “Have you heard of Braph the magician?” Llew asked.

  Jonas scowled at her.

  “Heard of him? Yeah,” Rowan replied, continuing his scrutiny of Jonas’s physique.

  Jonas grunted and allowed Rowan to manipulate his stumped thigh as he took further measurements – from stump to floor, the circumference of Jonas’s thigh – and continued talking, crouched at floor level, measuring Jonas’s remaining foot.

  “There’re rumors he had his own Aenuk to power his magic; until recently, anyway. Don’t rightly know all he can do. Some thought he’d tip the balance in our favor at the border, but I’ve yet to hear anything concrete.”

  “He can fly,” Llew said, and Rowan stood to look wide-eyed at her as she continued. “He can fight like a Syakaran, heal himself like an Aenuk, and fly across a country in minutes.”

  “Wow. Really?”

  “And we need Jonas to be able to do all that.”

  “Llew. No—” Jonas protested.

  Llew fixed Jonas with a flat look before turning back to Rowan. “We need you to look into how to fit a vial of Aenuk blood – my blood – to that leg and feed it into Jonas’s bloodstream. We’ve seen how Braph does it, so we can help you with that.”

  This story originates from a different website. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

  “Llew—”

  “Then—” Llew flicked Jonas a look so fleeting he couldn’t hold it. “We need to work out how to make crystals from my blood. Braph used some sort of machine, and he could put a whole body’s worth of blood into a crystal about so big—” Llew curled her fingers in an almost complete circle. “Jonas is going to need that to help him heal from his surgery and—” She stopped herself from saying too much. She’d already crossed Jonas’s line. “Vials of blood should be enough to start with, but the crystals would be better.”

  She was right that he’d need her blood to heal quickly, but he didn’t like where her mind was headed with the crystals idea. He couldn’t go draining all the blood from her body to create a crystal to live off.

  Jonas closed his eyes, recalling the euphoric sensations that had come after Llew had healed him at the site of the ancient Ajnai tree before it had toppled. Intoxicating … addictive. Wrong.

  “Aenuk blood …” Rowan looked Llew up and down. “I wonder how he figured that out.” He grimaced. “Actually, I’m guessing I’m better off not knowing that story.” He turned back to Jonas, giving him another once-over. “I suppose the blood vial wouldn’t necessarily have to be attached to the leg. Doesn’t Braph wear a wrist cuff, or something?”

  Jonas nodded.

  “You wouldn’t want a vial breaking off in the middle of a scuffle, and I’m guessing that’s what you’ve got in mind. ”

  Truth be told, Jonas would prefer to never see his brother again, but … “Braph won’t permit me to live without provin’ himself against me. I don’t plan to seek him out, but I can’t guarantee he won’t come lookin’ for me.”

  Rowan glanced at his sister. “Kind of funny how your advantages seem to have driven a wedge through your family. No one has it all together, I guess.” Rowan closed his notebook and slipped it and the prosthetic leg into the tote bag. “I mean, here the world has the gifts of Karan strength and Aenuk healing and all we can do is line them up and tell them to kill each other. Sure, the Aenuk healing is dangerous, but I feel like if it was harnessed the right way … Never thought it was right, them being locked up, conscripted to the army before they’re even born. They are people after all.”

  Jonas had been conscripted to the Quaven army before he was born and he hadn’t found it distasteful. But he’d had a childhood, for what it was worth, before signing up. By the time he did, at fourteen, he was more than ready to go. He understood what it was that Llew wanted for Turhmos’s Aenuks: choice. Jonas had had little chance to make his own choices in life until recently, and he didn’t seem to be doing too well at it. Llew had been making her own choices since she was a child, and Jonas thought she was quite adept. As with anything, he supposed, practice was vital. With that in mind, it wasn’t going to be a simple task letting the Aenuks out into the world. They would need guidance. One step at a time.

  As Rowan spoke, Llew seemed to stand taller, her eyes bright. “With Ajnai trees, there’s no reason to keep Aenuks locked up. And that’s what we’re going to do once Jonas is fully healed; plant Ajnais and free the Aenuks.”

  “Well, if there’s any way I can help—”

  “Me, too,” said Elka.

  “I don’t think Ma would argue if I volunteered her, too. She’d be right keen to help the Aenuks.” Rowan twirled the measuring tape in his fingers, rolling it into a tight coil. “I guess the first thing to do is get this guy back on his feet. I’ll play around with some ideas.” Rowan’s attention had already turned inward, focused solely on the challenge he perceived and the creative solutions he might engineer.

  Jonas had seen that look before.

  He glanced at Llew. Her expression was sober, but she smiled when she saw Jonas looking, and raised her eyebrows in encouragement. Rowan wasn’t Braph, and he offered real solutions.

  “You’ve got those, in the meantime.” Rowan indicated the crutches. He slipped the tape measure into a pocket and hooked the tote bag over his shoulder as he continued. “Come on, sis.” Rowan signaled Elka. “We’ll leave these folk be. They’ll be sick of the sight of us soon enough.” He grinned around at them while backing through the door and holding it wide for Elka to follow and Llew chuckled. Chuckled. It had hardly been a joke.

  Almost the instant the door snicked closed; Jonas let the crutches fall. Llew flinched at the sound. Hands gripping the chair for support, Jonas hopped around it and landed heavily in the seat. Anger flooded him. But this time he sensed the truth behind it. Fear. He was weak. He was broken. In the heart of Turhmos. He’d lost his mentor, his best friend, even his horse on whom he’d dumped years worth of frustration, fears, and hurt when there was no one else safe to open up to.

  And he felt jealousy: jealousy over a mundane man. He wanted to laugh it away, but he was mundane now. Mundane and crippled. And not even tall.

  And, if he were hurt, he couldn’t be healed by an Aenuk’s touch.

  Llew crouched in front of him. She gripped his left knee with her right hand and briefly sought his right with her left, but his right knee was gone, so she gripped the arm of the chair. “We’ll be alright,” she said.

  “Will we?” He managed not to snarl, but it was a near thing.