“What are you doing?” I asked her, fearing that I already knew.
“I do not know how he could do it. But if he tries…if he tears your body from this place, just as Dewara once did, then I will still keep your soul. Or as much of it as I can.”
“You would divide me again?”
“I hope not. I hope that all of you will stay.” Tears had begun in her eyes. She put her free arm around me and pressed the soft flesh of her body against mine. “Hold tight to me,” she pleaded. “Hold very tight. Don’t let him take you away.”
“I won’t.” I put my arms around her. I kissed her. “I’m staying with you,” I promised. Our mouths were so close I felt her breath against my lips. I felt her tears cling to my cheeks. Another streak of pain raced down my back. I cried out, but held tight to Lisana. Another stripe, this one right next to the first. And another.
They came in a methodical flogging now, one after another, each agony laid down next to the previous one. I could not control my response to it. The body I had imagined for myself in Lisana’s world had a bloody ruin for a back. The blood streamed down my legs, and I trembled with the pain, but held on to her. There was nothing else I could do, no way to defend myself from the greedy flesh-stripping birds that attacked me in another world.
It went on for a very long time. When Lisana could no longer hold on to my body because of the damage it had sustained, when I had sunk to my knees, moaning with pain, still she stood by me, weeping and gripping grimly the handful of hair on the top of my head.
The first time I had ever met her, when we had come together as adversaries, I as Dewara’s champion and she as the guardian of the dream bridge, she had seized me in the same way. And when I fell into the abyss, she had kept that grip, and jerked out of me a core of my person. She had kept that piece and it had grown to be Soldier’s Son. But what would happen to me this time, neither of us knew. I did not even know if I would be torn from her world. Perhaps, when Orandula was through with his torment of me, he would let me go, and I could heal and be with her.
A grimmer thought came to my pain-encrusted mind. Perhaps the torment would never end. Perhaps this was what the Old God meant by taking my death from me. That even after my life was over, I would know no peace. It seemed too cruel a fate to contemplate; could anyone, even a god, do such a thing?
For the first time since the torment began, Orandula spoke to me. “Of course I could. But that is not what we agreed upon. You told me I could take your death. And I will.”
“Please! Mercy,” I begged.