Helloooo. I just finished reading chapter 18 of, ‘The Weight of Us,’ and I’m hooked! Any chance you’re working on this story and will be updating it soon? Our girls are both in pain and I NEED to know what happens next, please. 😬
NONNY!!!! I am legitimately SO pleased to hear you've enjoyed reading....I really, really would love to get back to the fic soon and to give our girls what they deserve.
For now--and to perhaps make me accountable to keep working on it--how about I share what I have written of chapter 19 so far? Just for you ;]
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The sight of the blood was staggering—hostile and copious and fresh, lathered boldly all over, fouling the courtyard stone with its scarlet urgency.
And in the absence of an obvious victim, nobody gathered could say with certainty whether it had been spilled from beast or from man.
Cara, arriving as the pastel sunrise began its slow breach of the morning mist, was somehow (and yet, deeper, unsurprisingly) the first one privy to the grim scene.
Truly, she smelled it before she saw it. The sharp odor of it—raw iron and salted earth—lashed at her, raising her hackles as she approached the training yard. Sensing it altered her pace. Not exactly out of alarm, but from the gritty feeling of removed and morbid familiarity. The first breathful rushed through her perception and submerged her in the distant potency of temple training and the carnage of battle.
And for that brief instant, for those two hastening heartbeats, it elicited something akin to relief.
Wrapped up in that abrupt recognition was a taste of deliverance from the safe and stakeless hypotheticals of instructing the recruits. A definite departure from the vacant routine she had passively slipped into over the past fortnight: long days spent training. Always presenting early, using the morning heat to sweat out the wine or ale that had kept her teetering on the edge of sobriety hours before. Some nights trickling by alone in her chambers, staring into the darkness until her eyes ached, unable to discern whether her mind was too full or completely empty. Others spent trying to separate from her own skin, lying in bed above a tavern full of late-night diners and carousers—with Dahlia, sated and sleeping, curled against her bare back. Touching too much to feel at rest, touching too little to feel numb, churning like mad inside all the while.
And every moment across and between, feeling faceless in the daylight without even trying—trying to keep Kahlan out of the spaces between her ribs, keep her away from the thoughts that roiled in idle moments.
Forced to live with a choice she did not make.
Bearing the seal of Aydindril on her chest felt like a cruel sham when she hadn’t so much as spoken to Kahlan in twelve mornings—since she walked out of Kahlan’s solar, heavy limbs, exhausted spirit. Only silent, avoidant awareness colored their few encounters, trying to ignore the way Kahlan was trying to ignore her. Gazes askance. Kahlan’s hands fumbling. Cara’s curling into shaking fists.
A duty-bound protector who could hardly look at the one she was meant to protect.
Laughable. It was laughable. It was all laughable. She was laughable.
(She wasn’t laughing.)
The golden badge was minuscule, but its weight kept dragging her down ever farther.
A momentary distraction like this was more than welcome. But Cara’s hammer-hearted, near-delighted anticipation diminished rapidly as she came close enough to see the state of the courtyard.
Alert concern billowed up in its place when she remembered one thing, and realized another.
Cara remembered that blood like this had absolutely no place in the courtyard of the Confessors’ Palace.
And she realized that it had been left there in a way that was anything but random.
Something ethereal and deeply-ingrained ripped through the listless fog, like an unyielding hand reaching up to seize her by the jaw. Cara thought of Kahlan still fast asleep in her chambers—mouth half-slack, hair across her face in the closest semblance of a mess, breathing slowly with slumber, just the way Cara used to leave her at this hour.
And for the first time in days, the image and the remembering of it didn’t come bearing ache.
Only sudden focus, Only rigid precision. Only purpose. A surge of everything that had compelled her to stay here, the reason to still exist in this place.
Binding, defining connection.
Her forgotten name echoed back to her in Shota’s patronizing tone.
Agile motion stemmed from reflex. Cara’s hand darted her hip, and she let out a clipped snarl of agitation when she felt neither Agiel nor axe holstered there. Half a pulsebeat and all of the coursing hypervigilance carried a twofold reminder: her Agiels were useless, and she had left her axe behind in mind of the day’s objective of working on more advanced hand-to-hand combat.
Never again, she thought, cursing both that idiotic decision and how she had allowed herself to slide so far away from discipline. She channeled the self-indignation into a loud whistle and a less-than-delicate gesture at the Home Guard patrolman who was approaching from her right.
“Tell me,” she demanded, pointed and gruff, leaving no amount of incredulous rage in question as her voice carried across the space with ease, “what halfwit failed to notice this? I’d like to be personally introduced.”
The guard’s mail jangled as he quickened his pace to a loping dash. The expression half-hidden by his helm betrayed equal parts shock at the bloody display and ill-suppressed fear of the furious Mord-Sith. The latter caused his speech to sputter.
“This was not here on my last passthrough.” He paused, blinking, realizing he had just revealed himself as the halfwit and there was nothing he could do to retract it. “I swear it on my firstborn! I would never let something like this go unreported.”
Cara stared at him, lips pursed and eyes burning with disbelief, until his frozen discomfort was palpable. Finally, she barked: “Then why aren’t you reporting it now? Go!”
The sentry who had been unlucky enough to be assigned this particular watch nearly tripped over himself in his hurry to alert the other watchmen—and to get as far away from Cara’s scrutiny as possible.
She saw him off with a dangerously skeptical scowl and then took up hawkeyed surveillance of the area, in search of either the bled or the culprit. There was no sign of either except for the spillage on the stonework.
Cara took care not to step in any of the slicks of it as she approached the palace wall, raising her gaze and then narrowing her eyes as she attempted to read the silky-wet red lettering slathered onto the space below the Mother Confessor’s balcony.
STREGANICHA
It wasn’t a word Cara recognized.
But even unfamiliar in meaning, it roamed over her skin with a sinister chill.
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