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I am seven years old when I watch my mother finally die. Finally, because she has been wasting since I was born.
The day starts like any other.
We wake to shouting, or hunger, or, rarely, laughter. My mother’s face is round and sweet as she smiles her silent greeting. Her voice burned away with the same fever that beads moisture on her smooth brow now. In a way, we are both grateful for it; it is warm and there are holes in our blanket.
I take the time to brush the hair from her eyes. My hands are thick with youth still, somehow. I think they should resemble hers more. Boney, knobbed, and worn like powder blue sandstone. Our eyes, at least, are the same. Despite my large, pointed ears and sharp jaw that I will someday grow into, there is no doubt of my parentage from one look into my mother’s eyes.
When I think back on them before I had left her that morning, I wonder if her sense of knowing was truly there. I hadn’t seen it then, when I set out to gather the sparse, jewel-green healing herbs that grew in a crevice no one but I bothered to check. I’m never sure if it would be better or not, for her to have seen it coming on that particular morning.
It doesn’t take me long to prepare the medicine; I had been taught it just once, by the Priestess who looks at me like she knows what I’m thinking, but I remembered it simply. Our mortar and pestle is crusted with the same green the paste breaks into. The smell is bittersweet and familiar.
My mother is dead when I bring it to her.
She lays in the same position I left her, staring at the doorway; staring at my back. Her almond eyes are open and still burning green despite the ashy lifelessness that has already sunken her cheeks. I don’t know if the lump in my throat forms because I was not by her side when it happens, or because I am sick with relief.
I am thirteen years old when I watch my brother get murdered.
Despite being a handful of years younger than me, he has always been bigger. It never stops me from stepping in front of him with defiance in the hard set of my jaw, never stops me from tearing pieces of bread in uneven halves and handing him the larger of the two; but something stops me from saving him. I named it cowardice.
He does nothing wrong that day, but I am always saying that. My brother, loud and rowdy, round face always cut in a toothy grin, is without faults, even if I can see in the cant of his shoulders when he thinks I am not watching that he blames our mother’s death on his birth. I have told him in so many ways that it was mine; with needles and thread in his tattered clothes, daggers in my small hands to carve flesh or apples, lines creasing my brow with habit.
He tells me to run, as the city guard pick him for their ritual sadism. He never tells me this, the words are like Elvish; a few familiar syllables that make sense in an otherwise unintelligible string of sounds. A man is already kicking him hard in the ribs and I am the only one left on our dirt road. The others know better than to stay once the guard has chosen its example of the day.
I am frozen in place, the better part of me is drawing my weapons, pouncing on the guard’s back, feeling the give of his flesh beneath my blades, the satisfying squelch of his blood muddying the ground a hymn of vengeance for my people. But my brother’s eyes – round, unlike mine, but burning green all the same – capture me. Live, he is screaming. For what, catches in my throat.
A guard turns and notices me. His lips are drawn sharper than my resolve. It thaws my joints and I run, at last. I wonder if my brother was sick with relief in his final moments.
I am a man, old enough to know better, when I watch a girl who is not my daughter bleed for me.
We look nothing alike, discounting racial similarities, but her eyes burn green when the dagger arches at her all the same. Like my brother, Niaven has done nothing wrong. She is joyful in the same ways he was, optimistic like my mother. She has known little to no adversity and if I could bargain with the universe the way Priestess Sianna thinks I can, I would keep it that way.
The sun is high and bright when we are attacked. It streaks off the blade I dodge like phantom water. Nia is preoccupied, for a moment, with the caravan we are soon to board. Perhaps the assassin thinks her an easier first target when he changes his tact, I can’t be sure. There is no time to think.
I know as the steel connects with her eye that it will take more than her sight. For a moment, I feel like a Reaper’s raven, bearing witness to so much loss; my hands clean only by a technicality.
Sorry, I repeat like a groveled prayer. My hands are boney, knobbed, and worn like powder blue sandstone as I wrap half her delicate face in cloth that immediately stains red. I am relieved that she is angry. She curses me and it is cathartic as bleeding.
Her face, robbed of one green gem, is devoid of that anger as I watch her kill a man weeks later. We look nothing alike, but I know my own horrified expression is mirrored by hers. There is panic and regret and pain. Evergreen pain.
The dagger had stolen a part of her joy that day. On this one, the poison spray burns away her innocence as it reduces the man’s flesh to bubbling filth. Despite the blood pooling at my feet, and the ghostly splotch that appears on Nia’s face from the corner of my vision at times, my hands are clean; still only by a technicality.