*Weekly updates* "There are no leashes now, no bindings," she says, her voice a dark lullaby in the flickering candlelight, "and it is their sacrifice that gave us this. Nothing can ever repay it. No one can ever take it from us. So now, in this hal...
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Fire burns in her poison dreams, gold and beautiful, smoky and acrid. It burns lattice-like across plains and leaves, weaving patterns as old as the dirt. Maybe she dreams of burning because she is burning, with only a few cool, clear moments—flashes of Hiran, crouched over her; Engle hovering with healers in the room. That day of darkness feels like an eternity, a spiral into a dead infinite, and when the dawn breaks on the second day since the Moot, Tara feels like she has lived a millennium, only to be sent back to do it again.
From the crumpled, haggard appearance of the Nature-caller pitched in the armchair beside her bed, Hiran seems to feel the same.
Whatever foul concoction Freija's poison was, it seems to have flushed through her system now. With the breeze trickling through the cracked window, Tara feels coolest she has since the Moot, and she takes a blurry moment to feel it, to sit and watch the pale morning light fall into the room, shimmering on the white-capped mountains outside her window.
As she regains more coherence, she realizes everything aches, and the thought—her first clear thought, is simply: Let's never do that again.
Tara snorts, and the man next to her shoots up like he's been stung.
"Bloody bones of Luella," Hiran swears, appearing far worse for the wear than she had even initially estimated. "Tar, if you ever do anything like that again, I swear—"
"I was led to believe that was a one time deal," she croaks as she discovers her throat feels like it had recently swallowed sandpaper. She winces, and Hiran immediately turns to the glass and pitcher next to him. "I don't think I'll be around for the next one."
"I don't want to hear about a next one," he snaps even as he pours and then hands her a glass. She can hold it upright, which is good, and the cold water down her throat is divine. "I don't want to hear about Moots or conclaves ever again in my entire life."
"Agreed," she rasps, and she takes another drink.
"You've been unconscious for an entire day," he tells her. "The doctor or shaman or whatever said it could have been for an entire week. He said you could die in your sleep."
"What a letdown that'd be," she says and she coughs. "Win the Moot, but die before my coronation."
"It's not funny."
She looks up at him.
"I know," she rasps.
He crumples back into the chair next to her, looking as if he too had survived a poisoning. There are a great many things Tara thinks to say, perhaps even wants to say, but she saves them for a moment.
"You should sleep," she tells him instead. "Get Engle and my 'shaman,' and go get some rest yourself."
He looks over to her, his green eyes bleary and red-rimmed.
"Go," she repeats, grabbing his wrist, holding it. "I'm okay now. Go sleep."
Hiran leaves, and soon enough she has a new visitor, one less concerned with the physical condition of the new Chieftainess and more with her political one.
