The next time the guards let us go down to the river to bathe, I could barely hold myself up. I stumbled, and Iona caught me, wrapping her arm around my waist and pulling my arm around her neck.
The contact rushed through me, and I looked at her. “Did you feel that?” I asked her.
She nodded.
“Has that happened before?” I whispered.
She shook her head.
As we walked, I felt stronger, her healing power just like Kata’s. The cuts on my wrist scabbed over, and she held her hand forward. The redness in the stumps was gone. “Healing?” she whispered.
I showed her my wrist. “Yes. If you can control your powers,” I whispered, “and heal some of us to do the same, we might be able to get out of here.”
She pulled out from under my arm. “Don’t say that. They’ll hear you.”
“Iona—”
“No,” she said vehemently. “I can’t. Don’t ever ask me to.”
I wanted to change her mind, to convince her that her power could save us all. But I knew I couldn’t guarantee her safety. How could I justify her risk? So I said, “Very well. But thank you, for what you did.”
She moved farther from me, putting her head down.
As we took our clothes off and went into the water, I cleaned myself and saw no new blood coming from me.
I went still in the river, shivering and staring at the cloth, without any red stripes on it. “No,” I gasped, and cleaned harder. Still, no new blood came from me, and I slipped to my knees in the shallow water, clutching the cloth to me.
I felt the weight of stares on me, but I didn’t pay attention until Iona knelt in front of me. I was rocking now, moving back and forth, trying to find some way to breathe around the horrible, huge pain in my chest. Iona touched my arm, and with the rush of healing, something broke inside me.
Curling around my knees until I almost drowned myself, I sobbed. She was gone. Nothing was left of her, not even a little trail of blood between my legs.
I had lost my daughter, my family, my whole heart. My faith, and my way.
The guards didn’t take me from my room for a long time, and I had no way of knowing how much time had passed. They fed us, but either the intervals were irregular or I was losing my understanding of time. There were no new screams. There were murmured words about how the blood hadn’t worked, and the quaesitori suggesting solutions that I barely understood, something about the freshness of the blood, a way to bind vein to vein.
The next time the guards took me to bathe, I didn’t see Calix anywhere. I hadn’t heard his voice either, and as they sent me back to my cell untouched, I wondered if he had left.
They stopped feeding me and gave me only water. I had no idea how many days passed, only that my power didn’t return and they didn’t hurt me. Locked in my cell, I heard Dara as they continued to test her, making her scream until the room blazed full of light and fire.
One morning Iona came to me while we were bathing, catching my hand in her own. My body drank in her power, giving me strength where I had none. “I can’t heal the others,” she whispered to me. “I’ve tried. You pull it from me, but I don’t know how to do it on my own.” She met my eyes. “But he said—he said you took down a mountain. Is that true?”
I shook my head. “In a way. But I can’t even feel my power anymore. It’s not just that I’m hurt; it’s gone.”
She jumped away from me, looking at her hand and frowning, then shaking it.
“What is it?” I asked.
She looked at her hand for a moment more. “I don’t know. When I was touching you, something … jumped. Do you know what that is?”
I felt broken, and weary, and empty. “No,” I told her. “I know almost nothing about these powers.”
“But—”
“If I knew, my family wouldn’t be dead. My baby wouldn’t be—” I halted, shaking my head. I moved away from her. “I don’t know anything about these powers, Iona.”
She sighed, and left me alone.
When we returned to the room, Calix walked in, and my heart stopped when I saw Danae behind him. “Danae!” I screamed. The guards grabbed me when I tried to run to her, but she turned to me.
“Shalia,” she said, her throat working. She glanced back at Calix, and then walked over to me. “Three Faces, you’re thin,” she said. She glared at the guard holding me back but didn’t order him to release me.
“Danae, please,” I said. “Tell him to let me go. Please!”
She nodded. “I’ll try, Shalia. But I have a chance,” she said, looking impossibly sad, “to help him. I need to help him so I can help you too. Do you understand?”
“No!” I cried. “Danae, please! Please!”
Regret filled her eyes. “I’m sorry for all that you’ve suffered. I still think of you as my sister, you must know that.”
I slumped against the bonds of my guard. “Please,” I cried. “Don’t leave me here, Danae. Please.”
She turned away, and Calix put his arm around her, pulling her farther from me.
I was left alone in my cell, and this time I couldn’t hear anything.
The next morning Iona nearly ran over to me while we walked to the river. She clasped her hand in mine, and I felt the immediate rush of power. “They killed her,” she breathed.
“Danae!” I gasped.
“No,” she said, looking forward at the others. “Dara. The fire power.”
I looked around. Iona was right; she was missing.
“You have to heal yourself,” Iona told me. “You have to heal yourself and get us out of here. Yours is the only power that could do it.”
“I told you—”
She squeezed my hand, and her face looked panicked. “I don’t care. He’s right, you know—I’ve been here for God only knows how long and everyone presents their powers in the end. The power is always there—it’s always in you, it’s always inalienable. You have to find a way to get it back. You have to save us before we all die here.”
“Iona—” I started.
She gasped, cutting me off and holding up our hands. “There it is again. Concentrate—you must be able to feel it too.”
“Wait,” I told her, and we took off our clothes to go into the river. Once there, we locked hands again, and her power felt even stronger. I could feel it, like the threads of my power, but instead it was one single thread that slipped between our hands and connected us. Following it, I felt it give a strange little pulse. Like following a trail, I traced the thread through my body.
“The Three-Faced God is great,” she breathed. Her face was full of wonder, like I was some kind of miracle.
“Iona, what are you talking about?” I asked, but she didn’t break the hold, and I felt the pulse again, stronger this time. Steadier. Even and low.
It wasn’t my power, or hers. It was a heartbeat. And it was coming from my womb.
It shouldn’t have been possible, but my daughter, my fierce daughter was still there, still clinging to life. She was a daughter of the desert, of me, of my murdered family that had sent their spirits like soldiers to keep her alive.
Even in the small, secret touch under the eyes of the guards, Iona’s power rushed through me, healing me, healing us, and I sobbed, clinging to her, praying to every Sky and spirit I knew, thanking them.
My daughter was alive.