Ander - Part 6: Subchapter 78
78
Ordinarily Danado would have felt very self-conscious and uncomfortable under these circumstances. Bethany was sitting on a stool near the foot of the bed, carefully treating his toes with a smelly brown liquid that stung like fire. Layla was doing the same to his fingers, but unlike her mother, she was sitting right next to him on this same, narrow bed, one leg on the sheets, paralleling his own, and one leg off. She was so close that her shoulder kept brushing up against his. It was something that would have set his face on fire and had him blubbering like an idiot the whole night, but he simply couldn't feel any joy, not even the scary, heart-stopping variety of joy Layla seemed to generate around herself. Not when -
" - Banno, aren't you?"
Danado jumped and Bethany gave him a good smack on the knee. "Hey! Hold still or do you want me to mess this up!?"
"Sorry, Kai."
Bethany gave him a good dose of the evil eye before bending down over her work again. She had nearly finished one whole foot, but her daughter was still dabbing at his second finger with a wad of wet cotton.
"Sorry, I didn't mean to startle you like that," Layla said, putting the cotton aside and picking up a roll of bandages. "But I'm right, aren't I?"
"I'm sorry, I didn't catch what you were saying..." Danado admitted, watching the slow, methodical way she was wrapping his finger, around and around, holding his hand steady and occasionally rubbing her thumb across his palm.
"I was saying you're worried about Banno, aren't you? I can tell. It's written all over your face. Ever since Jon came in here and said that name you've been... well..." Her hands wavered. The bandage stopped halfway. His scarred, blood-raw fingertip pointed straight up, shaking in the firelight. "You've been like you were when you first showed up in Grovenglen."
I'm breaking my promise, Danado realized with a start. I promised I'd try to smile for her, and I'm failing, I'm failing so hard...
But how could he not fail? How could he even think about smiling for her when that monster might be out there somewhere?
"You don't understand..." Danado stared at the fire in the centre of the room, at the flames licking the pewter pot, leaving blackened lines of soot against the metal. Layla touched his shoulder, but even that wasn't enough. "You Foxes... You think the Wolves marching through the pass is the real problem, but you're wrong."
"What are you saying, Dan?" Layla asked. She tried to put on a reassuring smile, but even she couldn't pull it off.
Danado swallowed the growing lump in his throat. "You don't know. You can't possibly know. You've never even seen him, but I have. I've talked to him. I've lived with him in the same village my whole life, so I know..."
Bethany glanced up from her work. "What exactly are you talking about, Dan? What is it about Banno that makes everyone so afraid? I know he's done terrible things, but couldn't the same be said of many Wolves? Like the ones who maimed your hands and feet so horribly?"
Danado almost laughed out loud at that. "You want to put Banno in the same category as Dorin? No. Just no. They're not even comparable. Banno is a completely different creature altogether. Wholly separate."
"But why? What makes him so different?"
"He looks at almost everyone the same way. It's like..." Danado struggled to find the right words. "It's like he's not actually looking at you, but over you. It's like when you walk down that path you Foxes have in the middle of your town, the one that's lined with all those flat stones? You don't look at all those stones. You don't see all those stones. You don't even notice them. You just walk on them because they're there, they're part of the road, they all blend in with each other. That's the way Banno looks at people, like they're just stones to walk on. That's the way he looked at me. Like I wasn't even really there. If it was just that, it would have been one thing, but it's not. You see, he doesn't look at everyone the same way. Sometimes he stops and he looks at someone, like they stand out to him. I remember he sometimes stopped and looked at my sister. He didn't even try to be subtle about it. He just stopped in the middle of what he was doing and he... he just stared at her. He stared at her and he licked his lips. Like... Like he wanted to..."
"Eat her," Renna finished for him. After Jon and Jonah had left for the wall, she had sat down in the darkest corner of the tent with her tail curled in her lap, completely silent. Until now.
Danado nodded. "Yeah. Just like that."
Renna's hand crept up to her mouth and she slowly began to chew on her thumb nail, making it click between her teeth. "He sometimes looked at me like that," she said after a long pause, staring straight ahead at nothing. "Normally, when he looked at other Wolves, you could tell he was sizing them up, trying to figure out how good they'd be in a fight. That by itself wasn't so strange, though. Many of the warriors did the same thing. But when he looked at me, I'd get the feeling he was sizing me up in a different way, and I knew it wasn't the same thing Mother kept warning me about. Close, maybe, but not the same. This was something else. It was the same look hungry Wolves give a piece of raw, dripping meat. And when he looked at me like that, I'd always feel like he was stripping me completely naked, like he was... licking me with his eyes, and there wasn't anything I could do about it. I'd feel terrible for hours afterward. Filthy. That's what he could do just by looking at you."
The fire crackled. The light shone over all their faces, flickering orange and dancing shadows. They were beginning to understand, but it wasn't enough. There was one more thing they needed to know, one more thing that didn't make any sense, not even to him.
"My people... they loved Banno," Danado said, looking down at his partially bandaged fingers. "They did more than that. They practically worshipped him. He was the perfect Wolf in their eyes. Big, strong, deadly, fearless. He could do anything. To them, he was the closest thing to a living god, greater even than his father, the chieftain. But something you need to understand is that, as much as they loved him, as much as they adored him... they were also terrified of him."
Layla's grip tightened ever so slightly around his fingers. Not enough to hurt, but enough for him to feel the fear building up inside of her, so carefully hidden. "They loved him, but they were also terrified of him?" she asked, slowly shaking her head. "Dan, that... that's insane."
"More than insane. And if he's still alive... If he's still out there somewhere..."
"What is he!?" Bethany suddenly burst out. "You and Ander both speak of him like he's more than flesh and blood! Like he's more than some freakishly big Wolf! But if he's not, then tell me! Just tell me! What on earth is he, then!?"
After a moment of intense staring, Danado dropped his eyes. "I... I don't know..." he said, defeated. "I don't know what he is."
"I do."
Heads turned. It was Renna, curled up in the corner with her knees pulled all the way up to her chin. Her frail body was masked in stuttering shadows, save for her eyes. They glinted in the dark, every bit as sharp and emotionless as the medical tools so precisely laid out around them.
"What is he, girl?" Bethany asked. "If Banno isn't a Wolf, then what is he?"
Renna tilted her head, and in a voice that chilled everyone's blood, she said: "He is us."
Her words hung in the air like embers from a fire, floating, suspended, just waiting for the perfect time to land on something flammable.
"What do you mean?" Layla asked. She wasn't even trying to hide her fear anymore. Her hands were shaking so badly she couldn't even unroll the next set of bandages.
There must be hope, right? There has_to be..._
I am failing her so badly right now. I promised I'd try my best, and yet...
Danado was so close to her right now, but he might as well be back on Wolf Hill for all the good he was doing. Why did he even come down here in the first place? Wasn't to see her one last time before the currents of fate swept them one way or the other? Wasn't it to hold her hand and look into her eyes and give her the one thing she had asked of him? The one, tiny little thing? The simplest, easiest promise anyone on this beautiful green earth had ever made?
You'll smile for me again, won't you? If things look really bad, you'll smile again and make me feel better, right?
But how? How could he smile?
How?
"Sometimes, when a baby gets born too early, it comes out wrong..." Renna said, still speaking from behind her own bent knees and curled tail, as if she were hiding from her own words. "It comes out small and weak and covered in blood. It comes out looking like a tiny little animal. If it's lucky, it dies before it has a chance to feel any pain."
Bethany stopped working, even though she only had two toes left to go, and stared at the little girl in the corner with her mouth slightly open. Everyone in the tent seemed to have frozen solid.
"The reason they die is because they were born with something missing," Renna continued, "something not yet formed. They die because their hearts can't beat, or their lungs can't draw breath. They die because they're not finished." She looked off to the side, not meeting anyone's eyes. "I think Banno is just like that. He is a tiny little baby covered in blood. He was born with something missing, something not yet formed. But where he should have died, he kept on breathing, and where he should have had only one mother, he had a thousand. We, as a people, gave birth to him. And instead of strangling him in his crib as an act of mercy, we raised him up on a plinth and called him a god."
The fire crackled and the light flickered across her face, throwing her shadow across the walls of the tent, undulating against the wind and turning its shape into that of a hunchbacked monster. She looked up and the fire caught the glimmer in her eyes as a pair of shining red spots in the dark. "I believe Banno is still that bleeding little baby, born with something missing inside. He can't feel sadness or fear. He can't feel regret for the things he's done. He can't even feel pain, I'm pretty sure. But he can feel that there's something missing. He can feel that hole inside himself, and maybe that's why he's so obsessed with killing. Maybe that's why he always bites down on his prey. Maybe that's why he lives to taste the Flavour of Death flooding his mouth. Maybe that's why he killed Vallah. Maybe that's why he tried to kill Ander and Kiana and Jon-Sai's brother and his children. That's what makes him different from the rest of us. That's what makes him a monster. Not the fact that he has a hole inside of him, but the fact that he's trying to fill up that hole with the deaths of others. Maybe he thinks that, if he can kill enough, if he can make everyone just as dead and lifeless as he is, then maybe... maybe he won't feel so alone anymore..."
A thoughtful silence followed these words. Even the wind outside died down for a bit, merely rippling the tent instead of bulging it inwards.
Danado looked down at the hard, red nubs where his claws used to be. He knew exactly what she was talking about. It was the same thing that had driven Lana to strike out at Wardo. It was the same thing that had sent Dorin into a suicidal screaming frenzy, begging for death. It was the same thing that had wrapped its black, misshapen fingers around Danado's own hand, gently encouraging him to pick up the knife.
It was the same thing that had whispered in his ear, telling him to do it, telling him to end it, telling him that it would make everything better.
Telling him to kill.
Nilia called it 'hunger', and Renna called it 'emptiness', but in the end it was all the same thing. It was a shadow inside your heart, a stain on your soul. Sometimes it grew bigger.
Sometimes it swallowed you whole.
Danado knew exactly what she was talking about, and just the thought that he might actually have something in common with Banno on such a fundamental level chilled him to his core.
Renna suddenly got up and bolted for the exit. As she streaked by the fire, Danado briefly saw the light bouncing off the dark lines of tears flowing down her cheeks.
"Renna, what are you doing!?" Bethany called after the girl, but she didn't even slow down. She sprinted full-tilt into the flaps and began to rip at the knots, yanking at them with her claws, even biting down on the ones that proved too stubborn. "Renna!" Bethany got up and closed the distance in three long strides. "Stop that! Stop that at once!" She reached for the girl's shoulder, but Renna knocked her hand away and ripped loose one of the knots in the middle, crying and sniffing. "Renna!" Bethany grabbed her around the middle and tried to pull her back from the exit, but it was as if the girl had turned into a wild animal, kicking and thrashing. "What's gotten into you!?"
This is just like the time she jumped onto Wardo's back, Danado thought. He swung his legs over the side of the bed, intending to get up, intending to help, but the moment his feet touched the ground it felt like ten sharp rusty nails suddenly drove themselves deep into his toes and he cried out in pain. Layla pulled him back, shaking her head.
"I have to go!" Renna screamed through the tears. "I have to go to the wall!"
"Over my dead body!" Bethany retorted. "You will stay here, where I can keep an eye on you! Now calm down before you -"
Renna had only managed to untie two of the knots before Bethany grabbed her, but those two were enough. Her arms disappeared into the swirling white shadows and were quickly followed by her head.
"Renna! Stop that! No!" Bethany tried to pull her back in by the legs, but it was already too late for that, and her slender body slithered the rest of the way out into the storm like a worm popping out of an apple. "Renna! Damn it!" Bethany stuck her arm outside all the way up to her shoulder in a last ditch attempt to grab her, but Danado could tell by the angry, pained expression on her face that she was grabbing nothing more than fistfuls of freezing air. She pulled her arm back and peered outside, into the darkness of the night and the myriad of snowflakes blowing past the narrow opening in streaks of white. She grabbed the flap, seemed to consider untying the rest of the knots and going after her anyway, but then pulled it shut and retied them instead, sealing away the worst of the devilishly cold wind blowing about their ears. She straightened up, swiped the wrinkles out of her clothes, turned around and met Danado with the coldest, sharpest stare he had ever seen. "I do hope you realise that, if Sorrin comes stomping up to this tent, demanding to know what Renna was doing in the middle of an impending battlefield, I'm blaming you!"
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