Chapter 52.1: Sleepless Night

Penny stared into the inky black of the night sky: past the starlit earth and foliage, past the jagged treeline of the Brisban horizon, and even past the stars, if that were possible. The moon had long since set, and she hadn’t gotten a wink of sleep, glaring fruitlessly at the roof of a Vigil tent for hours before finally grabbing her knapsack and slipping silently outside.

Sitting on a half-buried boulder, Penny laid a hand on the bandages wrapped tightly around her midsection. They pressed some kind of slimy poultice into the shrapnel-gouged hole in her side. Others just like them did the same for the punctures that ran up her leg, but the wound in her side throbbed more than any of the others, despite the treatment—or maybe because of it, for all she knew. The Vigil medic had offered her some kind of dulling potion after dressing her injuries, but Penny had refused it. She didn’t really know why, but at least for now, she wanted to feel the effects. She’d probably be drinking the pain away soon enough, but not now, not yet; gods knew she didn’t want to remember, but she needed to. Too much had happened that day. She’d been responsible for too much.

Her mind made the long journey from one hand to the other, where she clutched the satchel she’d been holding on to for probably hours. It wasn’t actually her bag, at least it hadn’t been at the start of the day. Hell, now it most logically belonged to Jinkke; it had been her brother’s after all. For now Penny still held it, and as her eyes delved further into the sky’s abyss, she spidered a hand into the sack and across the shapes inside.

There should have been two of them, she knew, but there were a lot more than that after the day’s brutal events. She felt a human torso separated from its equine body, a pair of loose human legs, an arm with a sword and another with a feathered shield. Many more shifted about inside the bag, but their jaggedly snapped wooden ends made them harder to recognize by touch. It didn’t really matter, though. In her mind Penny had already rejoined the pieces into the figures of a poorly sanded seraph and centaur. Penny couldn’t bring herself to look at them, so her hands continued their autonomous caresses as she tried to escape the question that rattled at her brain: why the hell had Minkus kept them? She’d tossed the damn things aside just a day before—it was a day that felt like a year. In fact, she’d done it just fifty yards from where she now sat, and Minkus had not only kept them but had made a point to tote them along into the mess at Thaumacore. Minkus hadn’t made it out, but these had, more or less.

The irony, of course, was that if he’d left them right where she’d cast them off, they’d still be whole, waiting for her return. Now, instead, they were broken, shattered, the same as so many other things. The same as Minkus. Gods, the same as her fool of a— the same as her father.

She stared up into the night sky again, silently shoving her mind in any other direction. It wandered off to the rest of the day’s events, everything after the nightmare.

Their march back to the Vigil camp had been long and hauntingly quiet. Miles of that plateaued landscape passed them like an agonizing dream, the same miles that they’d traversed just hours before, but darker in every way. The sun set beyond the western buttes that hid that damnable complex, and darkness painted over the verdant green of everything, casting thickets of tropical trees and low shrubs in dense shadow that eventually consumed them.

The pain of barely field-dressed wounds and the weight of their losses had silenced everyone, even the ever-jabbering scholar—that part hadn’t been so bad. Penny had no idea what decidedly righteous judgement of the situation had lurked inside Ventyr’s mind across the sloping moss and grass and stone; he’d gotten what he was after despite the losses. The weights resting on the others had been easy enough to guess, though. The young crusader had lost another companion, and the scholar had experienced more trauma in the last few days than she’d ever read in the whole of her dusty, old tomes. Jinkke— well, that one took no thought at all, because it couldn’t have been far from what gripped Penny’s mind like a rust-stuck vice.

They’d left him. To whatever cold, vindictive, or even just careless end the Inquest would give to Minkus’ corpse, they’d left him. Penny had left him. In a purely logical sense, it wasn’t the worst event of the day, but it plagued her every throbbing step. Of all the people she knew, Minkus deserved better than that.

Hours later than they should have, they finally did reach the Vigil camp. Night guards initially gave them grief at the palisaded gate, keeping them at distance with threats of defense. That was, until Ventyr bit into them with an impatience Penny had thought he’d reserved only for her. The gates were opened, a medic was brought for triage, and that balding captain came to debrief them all. He welcomed Ventyr back, deferred his decision on Crusader Jindel’s punishment to the next day, and offered an available tent for however long the rest of them would take to recuperate.

Now Penny was here, on this boulder, staring into a void she wished she could just fall into. She still couldn’t bring herself to look, but her fingers continued drawing thoughtless lines across the small, mixed pieces of broken wood. Minkus had almost literally taken a bullet for her, and she hadn’t even been able to drag him out of that hellhole in repayment.

Penny pulled her hand back out, clenching the bag shut. She’d had enough sleepless nights in her life to know the sun would be rising soon. Little more than breeze-blown fronds replaced what had been a nightsong of crickets, frogs, and probably those predatory raptors she’d been warned about. That was, until the windswept silence was broken by a faint, gasping sob, barely audible, even above the nothing.

She let the sound float by her once, then twice. It wasn’t her problem, and what kind of good would she be anyway?

When it caught her a third time, though, something stirred her—not necessarily the sound itself, but maybe something about the bag? Penny really didn’t know what it was, and she didn’t have the energy to think much more about it, so she went with the instinct, if only to shut it up.

Holding her wounds—gods, they hurt—she moved quietly across the edge of the Vigil camp, spotting the light of a guard’s torch bobbing through the darkness a long way off. She’d purposely gone as far to the rear edge of their encampment as she could without stepping into the domain of the asuran krewe hidden away behind them. There really was no privacy to be had in this cramped ravine, but Penny had spent the bulk of her life in an overcrowded city; she could make it where she wanted. It looked like someone else had tried the same, and from the sound of it, Penny knew who it was.

She found Jinkke in the pitch-black shade of a pair of low, fat palms. Penny couldn’t actually see her, but she could finally hear exactly where she was.

There was a sniff and the shuffle of fronds. “Do you need something?”

“Do I— ? No, I don’t need anything.” Penny said. She really hadn’t considered what she’d say when she got here.

There was silence between them for a long moment. Penny fidgeted with the bag’s straps, squinting into the black but still unable to see Jinkke beneath the stubby plants.

“Can I please grieve in solitude, then?” The sobs were gone now, but a quaver remained in her voice—a quaver dancing along the edge of annoyance.

Penny felt a frustrated discomfort spring to life in her chest. “Fine. I just— here, take this.” She shoved Minkus’ pack through the broad fronds of the plants and waited for Jinkke’s hands to grasp it. When they didn’t, she lowered it to the ground with a huff and spun to leave. What the hell did she think she was doing?

There was a scraping behind her as the bag was pulled in beneath the foliage.

“Wait,” Jinkke sighed. “Please, wait.”

Against herself, Penny obliged, stopping. Discomfort, like gravity, still tugged her forward, but she glanced back over her shoulder. “I just thought— I don’t know what I thought. That you should have that, I guess. It was his, after all.”

“You loved my brother, didn’t you?” The response was faster this time, almost back to the asura’s usual talking pace, and it nearly threw Penny off her feet.

“What?” she demanded, turning back to face the blackened patch of tropical forest. “Love him? No, I did not love him. I never looked at him like that at—”

“Smoke and sparks,” Jinkke almost whined. “Not in an amorous sense.”

She leaned out, and Penny could see the starlight glimmer in her eyes. “I loved him. Our appa and amma loved him—as far as they know, they still do.” For a moment that thought silenced her, but she sniffed and went on. “You loved him similarly, as a friend or a brother. It was improbable not to, provided a person really knew him. And you did.”

Penny heard a subtle dose of a smile imbue those words, even if she couldn’t see it.

She crossed her arms, fighting against Jinkke’s words as they weaseled past her defenses. “Yeah, I liked him if that’s what you mean. Minkus was good— to me, I mean. Gods, the guy was good to everyone, but he was really good to me. And I just— well, how do you repay that? If you really want to put words to all that, I guess it would be something like—”

“You loved him,” Jinkke reasserted.

Penny tightened her grip around herself.

“I did too,” Jinkke said, her words wilting as she said them. She settled back more fully into the shadows. “I always will.”

Silence fell once more, and Penny was as uncomfortable as she’d ever been. It was too quiet, too damned quiet. She missed the noise of a city more acutely now than she had on this whole, gods-damned trip. She glanced at the sky, suddenly begging the sun to peek its head over the horizon and start this camp back to life, so she could focus on anything, absolutely anything, else.

Jinkke spoke up again, interrupting her thoughts. “If you need a seat, there’s abundant ground.”

Penny didn’t know why, but she took the offer, dropping a hand to the earth and lowering herself gently enough to cause only mild pain. The loamy dirt was softer than her boulder had been. Jinkke scooted out from beneath the layers of palm fronds, suddenly becoming visible in the faint dance of distant torchlight. She rubbed away remaining evidence of her tears.

Silence passed between the two for several minutes, and Penny quickly returned her attention to the blackness above them. Quiet with this one wasn’t quite as easy as it had been with her brother. Her empty hands felt at nothing.

“Do you know what these are?” Jinkke said. Emotion had left her voice, replaced with rote curiosity.

Penny looked up from the nothing gripped in her hand. “What?” She asked the question but had her answer before Jinkke spoke.

The asura shifted the broken chunks of Penny’s wooden toys across her palms. She hadn’t pulled them all out, but she was already sliding them into proper positions that gave an outline of one of the carvings’ original shape. Penny didn’t know why she’d left them there, but she suddenly hated the fact that she had.

Jinkke acknowledged the shattered figures with solemnity until a smirk touched her tone. “Keeping them at the bottom of a knapsack he took into a physical conflict wasn’t the best way to preserve them.” She wrestled back a small sob in spite of her persistent grin. “But that was my brother. They must have meant something to him.”

Penny finally sighed, putting her face in her hands. “Look, you already know the human toys are mine, so let’s drop the act.”

“Not an act,” Jinkke said. “There was a high likelihood,” she admitted, “but I couldn’t be certain. My brother has— had curious interests.” Glistening lines down the asura’s cheeks still shone in the pale starlight, and she nearly choked on the weight of her fumbled words, but she continued forcing the corners of her mouth upward in that faint, recollecting smile. “So,” she asked again, “what are they, and why are you consigning them to me?”

A dozen answers and twice as many questions flashed through Penny’s mind. She didn’t know why she’d handed over the bag with them still in there. Hell, she hadn’t intended to keep the damn things as of the night before, so what difference was it to give them away now. The way her gut riled up told her it did make a difference, which made her hate it all even more.

“I was giving you the bag,” Penny retorted, tightening her arms across her chest again. “Those were just still inside it. Your brother put them there, not me.”

“Minkus brought your progeny trinkets all the way from Divinity’s Reach?”

Penny’s mouth twisted. Her whole body did. A swell of feelings rose up in her: grief and loneliness, bitterness and guilt, and all of it wrapped in suddenly scalding anger. “It doesn’t matter,” she sneered. “I gave them up. He took them. They’re yours now, same as the bag.”

Wincing at the stabs of pain up and down her body, Penny pushed herself back up to her feet and left.

She pushed through a patch of brush and only just heard Jinkke call after her. “And no, I’m not well—thank you for asking. I lost my brother today.”

Penny choked back the sting of tears in her throat but pressed on back to her boulder.