Chapter 8: Cold Side of the Bed

Dain Korrigan knew every kind of dark by now, and this one was new.

This dark had a weight on his chest and a smell of pine smoke and honey in it, and somebody's breath stuttering against his ear.

He could not move.

He could hear everything.

"Dain," said the voice. "Dain, wake up. I will give you a moment, and then I start being rude."

He tried to answer, and found there was nothing to answer with.

Then the floor of the world tilted, and he was standing beside the bed in his pale body, looking down at his own face.

It was the same place he had stood for two years.

Two years and two months ago he had held the line at Kesh with a hundred ships behind him.

The Skarn Queen had come up out of the dark with her mouth open.

He had put everything he had into one strike, because that was the only way the hundred ships would live.

It had worked.

She had screamed and fallen back wounded.

The recoil had torn his core down the middle.

He remembered the exact feeling of it, the long soundless rip.

One half of him had flown away over the whole dark of space, farther than any ship and faster than any frame.

The other half had hung in his chest and burned.

After that he had been two things.

The body walked where it was led, ate when it was fed, and stood still in doorways.

The rest of him stood outside it, and watched.

He had watched the Council strip his honors.

He had watched his fiancée, in a pale dress, set her ring on his bedside table without once looking at his face.

He had watched the cook cry into a pot every night for a year and slide a tube into a mouth that would not swallow.

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