While I was recovering, the pain of my burns was still the thing sitting big in my mind, that and being half starved all the time. Yet I started to notice the little things. There were no fleas where I slept. I’m not boasting; we had fleas and vermin just like you do in your home. It’s the natural way, after all. They come from the tree like the wasps do. And they’re a nuisance when they bite, we all know it, but that’s how things are. They keep us fit and active, and like I said, I certainly got sick a lot after.
And the wasps, when I saw them, they didn’t sting me anymore; they cut a wide path around me.
And by then I was walking about and trying to be just one of Aro’s sons again, going into the fields, helping out with the woodworking, scaring away the Helibugs. It wasn’t the same. People didn’t like me anymore. No, that’s not the right way to say it. They couldn’t like me. I’d been Severed, even if not all the way. They looked at me and their senses told them, Not one of us.
It wasn’t aggressive, not at first. I had been a part of the community, and now I wasn’t. When we were out clearing stones or running pests out of the fields and I needed a tool, suddenly nobody would be handing one to me just as I reached for it. When someone brought the water round, they wouldn’t think to go to me with it. I’d have to go get it myself, and they’d look a bit surprised when I turned up in front of them. Maybe they would hold onto the gourd just a little too long, when I took it. Once, we had a Lazzar come in after the livestock at night and we were doing a count up to make sure nobody was hurt after we drove it off, and they missed me. Even standing right there in the firelight, they counted and called names, and I was never included. I had to look after myself most of the time, because there was only one other person who would look out for me. Melory, my sister.
Melory was born right before me. We came into the world together. We weren’t always friends, because siblings aren’t, but we were never enemies long. By that age we both had others whose company we sought out, but we always came home to the same house. When Melory was being teased, I went and sorted it out, with words and sometimes with fists. When I cut my foot open, back when I was nine, she dragged me all the way back to the village. We were all the family we had. Ma had died hunting Arraclids when we were seven, and though some kids reckoned they knew who their Da was, we never did. Like most of the kids there, we were children of Aro, and the community brought us up, but mostly we brought ourselves up. We were always there for each other.
And so I waited for Melory to turn from me, because that would be the last, the end. I was being thrust into a hostile new world. I was struggling to find things I could eat; I was struggling to avoid getting into arguments and fights with all the people who had known me just a short while before. If Melory had gone with the majority I would have died. Of starvation; of despair.
And she must have felt that break, inside her—the gap that had opened between me and everyone else. She didn’t let it rule her, though. She knew I was her brother. I was the same boy who’d shared every adventure, who’d dried her tears and let her dry mine. It must have been hard for her, but she fought past what her insides were telling her about me, and saw that I was still just Handry, who she’d known all her life.
And every day that passed after that just brought home how I’d have died without her. Three years I clung on at Aro, and it was like the whole community, the buildings, the tree even, were trying to shake me off. My friends weren’t my friends anymore. Livvi, Kalton, Chogger, they stayed away. I know Livvi’s Ma told her I was a wrong one now and she mustn’t go near, but Kalton’s Ma was dead just like ours was. He didn’t need anybody steering him away. His own eyes told him I wasn’t right.
I could see just how it would have been, how I’d have ended up getting a beating or even just driven out altogether. Every little thing that went wrong was my fault. It wasn’t that people really thought I’d broken the fence or scared away the Ossclaws so that the traps stayed empty, or that I brought the stinging rain unseasonably early. If I’d been able to look them in the eye and ask the question like a normal person, then they’d have said no, of course not, how could I possibly . . . ? And yet they looked at me, when this or that mundane thing went off course, when a gourd broke, when someone stubbed their toe. Some part of their minds was casting about for a cause, and there I was, the boy who wasn’t right, the boy who didn’t belong.
But there Melory was, too, and she wouldn’t let any of those looks or that talk go unchallenged. She did what I could no longer do, go and be angry with people and make them ashamed of what they were thinking. And if it didn’t stop them thinking just the same next time round, well, she was my untiring champion. She would go take on anyone to defend me. And she’d go early to the baker for the burned bread he made at her insistence, and that he probably wouldn’t have done just for me. She brought me water the many times I was sick, and when I twisted my ankle out on the top fields she forced people to come carry me back, when they’d most likely have left me there for the elements.
She always smiled, too. That was the one sisterly act she couldn’t quite pull off. I knew she was scared for me, and it wasn’t just because of what had happened in the past. Melory was brighter than I was, cleverer than just about anyone our age. I saw where her eyes strayed, and hers weren’t the only ones. Whenever my name came up, lots of people looked over to wherever Lawgiver Elhern was. Sometimes, when I’d get into a big argument with someone, because I was too tired and hungry and frustrated to keep my temper in check, they’d actually send for her. Elhern would come over and listen, and the ghost would descend on her and flicker from her eye socket and glimmer about the line of her jaw. Then Melory would appear beside me and squeeze my hand and hold her breath while placid, matronly Elhern vacated her own face and voice, and the ghost sat there and spoke instead.
And yet she never pronounced a sentence. I think the ghost didn’t know quite what to make of me. Sometimes it referred me to the doctor ghost, sometimes it just had nothing to say. The Severance hadn’t finished its work. I wasn’t entirely out, just as I would never be quite in.
And things only got harder, towards the end of those three years, because the doctor’s vessel was dying. For a whole long year, Doctor Corto just stopped seeing patients at all, and the ghost wouldn’t speak through him anymore. When people were injured or sick, then it was down to whoever could remember what the ghosts had ordered in the past, and sometimes they were right and sometimes they were wrong. When people got badly hurt, when they came in with bones sticking out of the skin or where a wild beast had mauled someone, then mostly they died, where the ghost might have been able to save them. Needless to say, he certainly had no help for me. He would just sit muttering to himself outside of his house all day, hands trembling and his one eye looking at nothing. People made sure he got fed, and come night they would take him inside and tuck him up, but he was past noticing them, just lost in meaningless conversations with the ghost locked up in his head.
I crept close once and heard him repeating nonsense to himself, over and over: “Installation failed, rebooting, rebooting.” He was like that for a full year, man and ghost clinging to each other like climbers on the point of falling. Then, at last, they found him cold in his bed one morning, and that was the end of Doctor Corto.