When Sophia slid her left leg back, angling her right half forward, Li Min clucked her tongue and reversed it, her fingers gliding along Sophia’s skin, clasping, just for a moment, around her small wrist. “Fighting is all angles, yes? Altering your stance so your good eye is set back might help; however, I think you’d feel most comfortable switching back and forth quickly, like this—”
Li Min danced from side to side, quick and light on her feet as she circled Sophia, constantly adjusting her stance so her left eye, which she had shut to demonstrate this to Sophia, was never in front for long.
“It looks like you’re dancing,” Sophia said, voicing Nicholas’s own awe. After a moment, she attempted to replicate the movement. Her face fell at her initial clumsiness, but soon she seemed to match Li Min step for step. And she was smiling.
“It feels a little ridiculous,” Sophia admitted, as they returned to the blanket and relinquished her blade again.
“You’ve not had time to become used to it,” Li Min said, placing a soft hand on Sophia’s wrist. “It will get better with time. You should know that there are countless stories of warriors who’ve borne a similar injury and overcome it. One general from my land was said to have been shot in the eye with an arrow. Rather than crumble, he pulled the arrow out, and ate the eye off it.”
“That’s disgusting, even for me,” Sophia said, laughing. “And you know it’s far more likely he did crumble and scream like a child. But who can blame him?”
“There is no doubt in my mind about that,” Li Min said, and for a while, they seemed content to play a game of trying to avoid the other catching their gaze. The slow drift of fingers across the blanket, easing closer and closer with each soft breath.
He was about to close his eyes and turn again to give them privacy when Li Min said, “There is still such a shadow on your face. What is troubling you?”
Rather than pull away, Sophia slid her hand lightly up along the other girl’s arm, drawing her loose sleeve up to touch her pale skin. She leaned forward, so close that, for a moment, Nicholas was sure she might rest her forehead against Li Min’s shoulder. “Did you mean what you said, about seeking revenge? That there’s no way to survive it?”
A deep sigh. “After I escaped the Shadows, I wanted nothing more than to grow strong enough to return and butcher them, as they had done my mother and my sister. It was enough to sustain me for years. I fed on the anger, bathed in fury, prayed with malice. But one morning, a woman on my ship asked me what I would make of my life after I had taken my revenge for their lives. I had not pictured anything beyond it. To me, it was a destination, and I had let it become a final chapter in my story. That realization made me decide the best revenge of all was to not willingly squander my gift of survival, but to live with the strength I had fought for and won.”
“But—” Sophia began, struggling to master her voice. “How do you live with it—the anger? The shame?”
Shame. Nicholas felt something rise and lodge in his throat.
Li Min’s hand stilled from where she had raised it, hovering just above Sophia’s tangled dark hair.
“No matter how hard I try,” Sophia continued, “I can’t forget it. It never leaves me. Its hands are hot around my neck.”
“Because one moment in life does not define a person,” Li Min said. “Without mistakes and misjudgments we would stagnate. It is no shameful thing to be beaten when outnumbered, not when you were brave enough to try. Nor is a scar or injury something to despair over, for it is a mark that you were strong enough to survive.”
“But it’s beyond me. The mistake didn’t end with me.” Sophia turned her head in Nicholas’s direction, as if trying to see whether he was still asleep. “I feel…we were in no way friends, but I feel sore about Linden. Responsible for what happened to her. His sad bastard face isn’t helping matters, either.”
“That’s understandable,” Li Min said, an odd quality to her voice. Her free hand cupped around Sophia’s, turning her palm up to rest in her own. She did not speak again until Sophia looked up and met her gaze. “But she had made her own decisions that brought her to that point.”
Had she? As far as Nicholas saw, Etta had never had a true choice from the moment Sophia Ironwood had entered her life.
“I mostly just worry about what will happen to him,” Sophia said. “Before, I wouldn’t have believed him capable of taking his vengeance out on Ironwood. Now I’m not so sure.”
Him.
Me.
Nicholas shifted on the ground, wishing he could use his right arm to brace himself.
Li Min nodded. “Earlier, I wanted to give him comfort, tell him that after the first death, there is no other. She has returned to the cradle of her ancestors, who shield her and protect her. But you can only say such things to people willing to hear them. He’s not there yet.”
It was like a hot blade sliding between his ribs. Nicholas pressed the back of his hand against his mouth.
“But what matters is what he believes, and he seems to be suffering not only a loss, but a questioning of faith and his path forward as well.”
“That seems to be going around these days,” Sophia said.
“It occurs to me that, while losing your eye has partially hindered your sight, the experience has allowed you to see through the lies you were raised to believe. You may go anywhere you like, so long as you take care, and you may be whoever you set your heart to be. There is true power in that, as you said to Carter before. Some of us are not so lucky—please do not take this for granted.”