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Broken All My Boughs and Brittle My Heart

by Cat Rambo

 

It was a lizard dropping on her face from the ceiling that woke Ambra in a panic. They ran back and forth all night, feasting on spiders and midges and the slower moths, but they were sticky-footed and rarely lost their grip. This one scampered away while she smacked herself in the face, much harder than she’d intended, so that she saw stars and bit her tongue, all at one.

Dawn, seeping gray, outlined the window, showing the shutter slats as faint lines of light. She nursed her tongue, which felt awkward and painful in her mouth, and swallowed blood as she swung herself up and out of bed, abandoning thought of sleep. Once she’d had a soldier’s knack of being able to sleep anywhere, anytime, but nowadays that skill was long gone and she was lucky to pluck a few uneasy hours from a night.

Cold stone struck her feet as she stood, and she fished around under the bed for the knitted socks that served her as slippers, disreputable and threadbare but warmer than being barefoot. The narrow chamber had only the single window; she moved to it and swung the shutters open, then leaned out on the wide stone sill.

From this vantage point, you could see the hospital’s main courtyard, empty now except for the caged roses set among gravel and a single servant using a rake to set that gravel into long, undulating lines running from north to south. By midday the gravel would be covered by footprints and the porch underneath her window, the only spot where the hamper-addicts could smoke the licorice-scented weed, would be surrounded by crumpled butts. For now, though, everything was silent and still.

Pulling her head back, she shrugged on a robe even more disreputable and went down to look for breakfast.

---

In theory, they were served every morning at the second turning, but old dietary habits died hard, and Ambra was unused to waiting to eat while on campaign. She was not the only one — most of the patients here were Knights or other military — and so the cook kept jars of jerky and field-cookies on a counter, and the kettle of water above the kitchen fire was always hot for tea, tended by a sleepy-eyed kitchen minion during even the smallest hours of the night.

The kitchen was already awake, though, sliding paddles covered with loaves of bread as well as fancier pastries into the already-roaring ovens. The subcook frowned into a vat of sour gruel being heated, stirring to break up larger lumps. Ambra poured herself lemon tea, then grabbed a field-cookie and took it with her, nibbling at the grainy edge, its flavor more hearty than sweet.

Outside in the garden, she paused to survey her surroundings, eyes narrowed as her head swept across the humped, flower-laden graves, a few small memorial benches, the field supplying the hospital’s vegetable needs, and the hedge-maze. She couldn’t see into the last but moved to a bench near its entrance, sitting down with a sigh.

“Have you thought about my request?” a voice said beside her elbow.

She jumped, startled. “Dammit, Gray, I told you to stop doing that.”

“I wasn’t,” the voice began, then paused. “Well, actually, I suppose I was.” The owner of the voice popped their head out of the hedge-maze. “But I wasn’t trying to sneak up on you on purpose. That time. I saw you coming and thought I’d give you a moment to sit down.”

“So you could ambush me.”

“So you could catch your breath.”

She ate the rest of the palm-sized cookie in three savage bites, not tasting it. But her voice was mild. “As to your request, I don’t think I’d be a very good teacher.”

“All you have to do is go with me,” he said. “Sit in on some of the classes, see what the academy is like nowadays. They said you don’t even have to take on any formal course, that if you advised a few, that would be plenty.” He sat down beside her and eyed her sideways. He lacked a decade or so to her forty-five years, but otherwise their faces and builds looked similar enough to be siblings: long-nosed and pale, broad-shouldered but short, with a wrestler’s stance that Ambra had always regretted. The Rose Knights in the stories were tall and graceful and towered as they led. She had to fight to be seen in any crowd.

“What is it the poet Tezcor says? Broken all my boughs, and brittle my heart . . .”

He snorted. “Look to a more recent verse, Driel: Sap rises.”

She shook her head. She set her palms on the stone bench on either side of her and stared forward, ignoring his presence.

They sat that way in silence while the sun struggled up over the horizon and adjusted itself to warm the garden beds. Bees hummed and bumbled their way through tangles of nearby roses, planted in waves echoing the courtyard’s gravel, and she smelled lemon and flowers and refused to think about anything else.

The only difference between them was the armor Ambra wore: bark and thorns growing directly from her skin, the sorcerous augmentation every Knight suffered during their early training, the magical plants whose roots ran through their bodies, strengthening them, the same roots that would someday encircle their hearts and tighten until they burst.

---

Nothing of the process could surprise a Rose Knight. It was explained, over and over to you, first informally, multiple times, until you took the first set of vows and then again — three full times, before those vows were over. You knew you would die of it eventually. You knew that the ceremony laying the plant into your flesh would be long, and painful, so very painful. You knew that the pain would be worse than anything else you would ever endure until the moment the plant killed you. You knew that you’d be isolated from your fellow humans by it, forever fending them off, literally.

She thought about this in the afternoon while Gray was working on her shoulders, checking the wood for signs of rot or dryness, trimming away spikey bits, blunting others, not enough to really hurt, just throb angrily for the next day or so.

When he left, she went walking in the hedge-maze. Her shoulders oozed sap and blood, left open to the air so they would clot and coagulate. But the dusk brought white moths, attracted by the sticky moisture, to crawl on her flesh, their long legs twitching at her skin, trying to gain purchase. She grabbed them between dry fingers and crushed each in turn. White wings fluttered down like petals.

Three days passed in this manner.

---

On the fourth day, she was brought before three doctors and their assistant, a vast round of flesh. They did not speak to her. One gestured for her hand, which she extended. They took it, squinting down angrily at the bark covering the knuckles and back, then took out a rasp and scraped away at it until living flesh was revealed. She bit her lip but did not protest or allow her expression to change.

They held the naked back of her hand against the pillar of flesh. It was warm and unpleasant and squirmed against her skin. After a few moments, a green tinge crept out from it from where her skin touched it, and spread like a bruise across its skin. They murmured among themselves, but she did not understand what they were saying, and supposed it was the secret tongue of sorcerers.

The Rose Knights had their own set of signs, but that was because in the heat of battle sometimes you could not hear, and handling gave you both something to fall back on as well as being easier to understand at a distance. They were signs like danger and go right and spy.

When the doctors were done, one took out a long knife and cut the living lump in half. It twitched and stopped moving. They examined the fleshy interior, which looked like a vast crimson fruit seeded with tiny black particles, and spoke more. Then they motioned at her to go, so she did.

The next day, she was called before the Administrator of the hospital.

“Your body is not broken, it is your mind,” he said without preamble, “and spells to fix the mind are far less reliable than those to fix the flesh. It is our advice that you take up some employment to keep yourself occupied while you wait to heal.”

The baldness of this, of your mind is broken, took her breath away.

She said, “A mind is not a bone or piece of wood. I think, I speak and feel.”

“When they brought you here, it was because you had almost killed a man who meant you no harm.”

She was not so sure of that, but . . . “He startled me.”

The administrator leaned forward. “And nowadays, when you are startled, you grow angry. Is that not so?”

She dropped her eyes, feeling the room’s warmth uncomfortable. “I . . .”

He did not wait for her to finish. “You were once a soldier. Now you hesitate.” She looked up to see the curl of his lip. “You pause, you panic. You think rather than act. You are no longer suitable to serve in His armies. You. Are. Broken.”

---

When Gray found her, she was sitting by the well, the little unused one that should have been boarded up long ago, and would have been, were there any children around.

He said, “I take it the interview did not go well.”

She looked down into the darkness. She had been dropping pebbles in, listening for the plink plink plonk as they bounced off the stone wall and then landed. “They need the space for people they can cure.”

“It is not that you cannot be cured,” he told her. “It is that they do not know how to do it.”

All she did was shrug.

Nonetheless the next day when he said he was going to the school, just to see what it was like, she agreed to accompany him. The school was on the coast, an hour and a half’s ride away; they did not take an escort. At first the sky overhead seemed oppressive and huge but gradually it lightened and the sky seemed bluer and the air clearer than it had been for a long time. She and Gray did not speak much as they rode along but when they did, they spoke of light and little things, old jokes and favorite memories.

As the gray building that was the school grew closer on the horizon, though, she grew quieter and quieter and at length Gray stopped asking her anything. It was perched on a cliffside, slumped like a hawk watching the pass, and the way up was a long switch-back lacing its way up the mountain. At each landing, it widened enough to pause and overlook the long fall of air and slide of shaly rock to the mountain’s foot.

They stopped halfway up to drink the last from their waterskins. She could feel Gray watching her as she stood looking out across the empty air.

---

At the school, faces pressed in all around her, eager and impatient. She tried to remember what it was like, back in her day, when they had visitors who were actual Knights. She could see them looking at her armor and wished that she had let Gray take better care of it. They deserved to see something splendid, not shabbiness.

Though, if they saw the shabbiness, would they not have a better understanding that all things pass? That you can be the feted leader, the champion, the shining one, but then it can all come crashing down and you do not know where you are anymore.

The air felt hot and heavy in her lungs. She gestured, and Gray said sharply, “Fall back!” She could sense their disappointment as they did so. Heroes should not show weakness. Not if you planned on being a hero yourself, someday, and that was what every girl and boy here dreamed of. You did not come to the Rose Knights unwillingly. You came full of noble responsibility and solemn dedication, knowing all the honor that accrues to your family in perpetuity.

But her family was all dead, she thought, with the exception of a few scattered cousins. Did anyone even think of her anymore in a familial, familiar way, other than Gray? Someone brought her a cup of water and she drank it down in three eager gulps and passed it back for more, but they must have misunderstood the gesture, for they took it away and did not bring her more.

Soon after that, they took the two of them to watch the student drills. She remembered this stone-walled courtyard, the gray granite carved with climbing roses underneath the nets of actual vines and flowers. Everything was carved with flowers and thorns here, and the air always smelled sweet and floral, even in the dead of winter.

The first thing she noticed was the girl in the back row.

Not the ones in the first few rows, full of eagerness and talent, most of them taught how to wield a weapon since they were small, sometimes by family members, more often by expensive tutors.

No, the girl in the back row barely belonged here and she knew it, by the way she moved, full of hesitation and fear.

That was not the sort of student Ambra had been at all. She had been precise and sure and strong.

A foot slipped sideways and the girl in the back row tripped. The owner of the foot sidled back as though nothing had happened, and the girl, face flushed with embarrassment, struggled to recover her footing.

The instructor said nothing.

Ambra remembered that. The instructors never intervened, unless it looked as though someone might come to serious harm. On occasion, not until after that. Every year at least one student killed themselves and the others did not look at them with pity or thinking I could have done that too. Instead they banded together and decried them for lack of dedication, or diligence, or even strength.

You had to be strong to be a Rose Knight. Strong in body. Strong in mind.

She had not been the child who tripped. She had been the one doing the tripping, feeling smug, knowing she was the instrument by which the gods weeded out the unworthy. This was all part of being a Knight and always had been.

Rumors had said that they would get their companion, the person who would tend them and be their squire all their days, till one or the other died, early in the school, but she had not met Gray until she was already a Knight, and by then she had learned that was how such things were usually done. There was no point in pairing a potential Knight who just as likely might wash out.

When they were tried and proven, then the pairing could take place.

So it had: she had been ushered in to see a diffident young man. She had thought once that the companions should be taken from the ranks of the failed Knights but with time she had seen how unsuitable that would have been, and how the companions, who had never dared aspire to be Knights, had their own quiet dignity. Gray had come from a fishing village on another coast, the fourth of six children, and he had chosen this path even though it was not one many from his village followed.

Where her changes were on the outside, his were internal: he had been given saps and liquors that became part of him, making him better able to work with her and at the same time removing certain parts of his personality. Sex drive was a major part of that, despite all the legends of Knights and Companions falling in love. That simply didn’t happen.

Not that any Knight could take someone in their arms without the risk of hurting them. A scratch from a thorn could prove perilous; only Knights and their companions were immune to the venom (and that was another process, almost as painful as the plant inlays themselves).

So Gray, companion for a decade now, was helping her fight for the Rose Kingdom.

And after the battle that had broken her mind, what now? He was trying to get her to teach.

The rows broke and came forward, eager with questions for her. She looked at the children and saw only blood and broken bones and the desperate, bubbling flesh that was the aftermath of a sorcerous attack. Bile rushed into her mouth so quickly she had to clench her teeth to keep from vomiting. She could not stay here and faint, but the room was pressing in.

Startled faces turned to her as she shoved her way out but she ignored them, running out into the courtyard, seeking shelter. She had been at this school for a decade; she knew the hiding places. She sought out the most secret, atop the only mausoleum in the tiny cemetery adjoining the kitchen gardens, but found it already occupied by the girl she’d noticed earlier, curled up against the brickwork, crying.

As Ambra pulled herself over the stone edge, the girl looked up, startled, face glistening with snot and tears. “Oh!” She scrambled to her feet.

“Sit down,” Ambra said. And added in explanation, “I’m hiding too.”

“You shouldn’t need to hide.” The girl slid back down, still looking at Ambra as though she were a book of promised answers to longhand questions.

“People,” Ambra said, and shrugged. The girl looked uncertainly at her, as though not quite believing her ears.

“But you’re a Knight!” she said. “How can you be afraid of people?”

How could Ambra answer that? She could say it was not that she was frightened of people, precisely, but that they wore at her, demanded things of her that she could not deliver. Or that she was afraid of her own reaction to people, because when she was frightened, it was as if her body were not her own. As though it was not the instrument that had served her better than any sword or lance. As though what she had once feared had taken place and she was entirely something else.

Instead she said, “Sometimes you need quiet.”

The girl nodded. They listened to the sounds of the school, people rushing out. Ambra had been missed; she suspected the girl had not.

From here you could see out across the valley, and the thin bootlace that was the road, running in and out of thickets and copses of trees. Three hawks hovered over a meadow’s smudge; one dipped and rose, then dipped and rose again against the sky’s vast blue bowl while near them two pigeons cooed safely in a small myrtle tree. Sunlight smouldered on the stonework and rustling leaves, sending up a dusty, tenacious smell, and then the breeze shifted and brought them rosemary and lavender from the kitchen garden.

When the cries grew too insistent, she went back in, and made her apologies, and said she would not come to teach there.

---

Gray was angry with her, she could tell that, but he had never been prone to outbursts. They rode in silence until the attack.

It came at a turn in the road that she remembered from the other side of the trip, a place she’d noted and thought this is where I’d place an ambush if I were a commander, so perfect for it and then they’d ridden on and she had forgotten entirely about it.

Bandits would not have attacked a Knight, but she wore an ordinary cloak. They would have thought the pair easy prey, the way they swarmed out of the covert, perhaps a dozen of them. Desperate, ragged peasants, armed with scythes and spears. And slings, she amended, as a stone whizzed past her ear. Those were deadly, those could take out an eye or even smash through that and into the brain.

She knew what she should do: pull her sword and spur her mount, drive it to smash into the mass of them. But it was no longer a Rose-horse, augmented as she was, just as armored and fearless, and so she hesitated, didn’t urge it forward. She had killed before; why was it so hard to lift her blade now?

Beside her, Gray had no such hesitation. He carried, as always, a steel-capped quarterstaff, the sappy wood as hard as iron, and it took out the two leaders. The crowd paused for a breath and that was when she should have acted but instead she could feel panic taking root, gripping her limbs, holding her locked, as they surged over Gray and it felt like almost a relief when he fell and they dragged her down in turn.

---

They could have died. But someone had been watching from far above, crouched watching them from the mausoleum’s top.

---

She recovered faster than Gray did; she always had. She spent three days watching beside his bed before he stirred and looked at her. She did not apologize, but she took his hand and squeezed it before calling to the nurses to bring him broth and restoratives.

Even with good care, it was another week before they left a second time, this time with a crowd of folk from the school, a holiday’s worth of students, chattering, clattering, talking to each other.

She did not think she had ever been one of these.

They paused on the third landing so a teacher could point out specific landmarks and deliver a brief lecture to the inattentive students. Ambra schooled her face to look as though she were listening, but her attention wandered off the ledge and down the rocky slope. It would be easy to step to the edge and then step again into empty air. The fall would kill anyone, even a Rose Knight in their living armor.

She stared down the distance. Suicides were cowards and so they’d leave her where she’d fallen. Her roses would grow among the rock, they always did, but no one would gather them. No one would strip lengths of boughs from the bushes to grow new strains, clothe new Knights.

Oh, how tempting, that oblivion, that long sleep among the rocks.

And what would that say to the children around her? She shook her head a little at herself — you are thinking like a creature of melodrama and self-importance — and squared her shoulders, and turned her attention back to the teacher, who was telling them about the battle that had taken place just before the school was established.

---

Gray found them living quarters on an island, near enough to the fishing village there for him to buy supplies, and he built his own bread oven, at first inside the cottage and near-killed them with the smoke, and then out in the garden. This time of year, the weather was at its best, though in only a white moon or so, the wind would take on an edge colder than any blade and winter would whittle away at the vegetation till only stubborn brown-and-gray bark remained.

It was not an unpleasant life.

Ambra took to going down each morning to watch from a hillside wall and see the ferry boat come in. There were usually a few travelers: merchants or visiting family, once a scholar writing a monograph on the cats of the coastal villages. Ambra invited that one back for tea and slices of Gray’s bread along with pickles and fish baked in herbs.

She was not prepared for the slight figure with the very large bundle on its back, who made her way off the ferry, and looked uphill as though her gaze were steel and Ambra a lodestone, then nodded, and began her way up.

When she arrived, Ambra, who had been thinking about what to say all this time, said, simply, “Why?”

The girl set her bundle down at her feet as though relieved to have the chance to breathe. “Why did I leave the school or why am I here?”

Ambra tilted her head but did not elaborate.

Blushing beneath that inquisitive stare, the girl said, “I want to learn from you.”

“The teachers will train you better in fighting than ever I can.”

“No, not that. Something else.” The girl stopped, swallowed, went on. “You see . . . you remember how it was if you were different. My family’s poor, I came because a noble owed my mother a favor, and the others, they never let me forget it. I couldn’t go home and disappoint her. But I couldn’t stay, either.”

“So you decided to leave.”

The girl shook her head. “Not then. Or, I guess, after a fashion. I thought I’d steal numbweed from the dispensary, enough that I could go to sleep and never wake again. It would have been peaceful, that way.”

Ambra swallowed the lump in her own throat. “That would have been a poor choice,” she said. “You are so young.”

The girl met her eyes. “And I didn’t, because of you. I watched you, both days when you were leaving, and the second time I saw you think about it. You looked out over the valley, and down, and you took a step a little closer and I thought, wherever she goes, I will follow. And then you turned around and looked at all of us, and smiled, just a little, and shook your head, and went back to your horse. And so here I am.”

“Girl, what do you think I can teach you?

“To persevere even in the face of my limits.”

Her eyes were earnest.

Broken all my boughs and brittle my heart.

And yet.

Gray’s voice, in her head, and the girl’s green eyes.

Sap rises.

 

 

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Host Commentary

…aaaaand welcome back. That was “Broken All My Boughs and Brittle My Heart” by Cat Rambo, and if you enjoyed that then there are ample other stories awaiting in our archives, from all the way back in episodes sixteen and twenty-two, “Magnificent Pigs” and “Dead Girl’s Wedding March” respectively, through five shorts, two miniatures and a giant episode, up to episodes 535 and 536, “The Threadbare Magician” in two parts. They also have seven stories on Escape Pod, and episodes on PseudoPod and Cast of Wonders, so rather than fill the rest of your commute/housework chore with that long list I’m going to instead recommend you go to our website, click on Cat’s name in the post for this episode (or search our site for their name) and follow all the links from there. You’ll also find yet more on their website catrambo.com: not just short stories and novels, of which there are oh so many, but also lists of writing resources and information on their writing classes, which are excellent.

On today’s story, Cat said simply this: This piece was written for an anthology dealing with mental illness in fantasy. As a PTSD survivor, I wanted to talk about what happens in the journey towards recovery.

Thank you, Cat, for the context and the story. It is no great insight or revelation for me to point out that mental health is still frequently a taboo subject and that the best way to deal with it on a personal and a societal level is to talk about it, though that is of course an emotional burden that then largely falls on those people least able to push their way through yet one more emotional burden.

It also, though, presupposes that one can recognise a given mental state as unhealthy. It’s easy to tell when you have an issue with your physical health, because we have nerves and pain receptors to tell us, and because our bodies have mechanisms for physical healing such that we have all generally known our personal baseline of “healthy” and can tell when something is wrong relative to that.

Mental ill health, though, is more insidious, not only because we must necessarily use the same unhealthy meat that’s struggling to identify that struggle—and new ideas, or any ideas at all, are very hard when you’re suffering depression—but also because so often it’s always been that way, and so as far as each of us is aware that is the baseline. And this is the real kicker, I think: even if our own bodies are always physically unwell, such that there’s a miscalibrated baseline there too, we can still recognise the illness because we can see other people’s physical bodies all around us. If you’d never been able to jump in your life, you’d still know that wasn’t right because you’d see basketball games.

But mental health? <exhale> We see inside our own heads—we think, therefore we are—but we’ve no way of knowing what’s in other people’s heads except through the meagre, limited vector of words. We can’t see that the incessant anxiety that exhausts our every moment isn’t a burden most people carry; we can’t see that the intrusive thoughts lancing in like lightning aren’t a common experience; we can’t see that traumatised reactions aren’t healthy, can’t see a healthy baseline to understand the ways in which they’re a distorted over-reaction to a prior, and different, event.

Which is exactly why talking about mental health is so important—all mental health. We need to know the good as much as we need to know the bad, the healthy baseline as much as we need to know the symptoms of poor mental health. Gods, it took me 38 years to get my autism and ADHD diagnoses because I had no way of knowing that not everyone else was thinking along the same paths I was! I just thought they were better at handling them, not that they had entirely different routes through life, through their own thoughts! It’s the Plato’s Cave of mental health: if all you’ve ever heard is an internal cacophony of voices constantly criticising and scaring and belittling you, how are you to know that’s anxiety and you can get help with it, unless someone else tells you there’s a world outside the cave with a measure of peace and self-acceptance?

And I do think that a measure of peace and self-acceptance is within reach for us all: not everything that ails us can be cured, almost none of it is even understood properly, but I know from my own experience that simply understanding it is not your fault—that you are not uniquely incapable, that you are and always have been operating with a handicap—is relief of its own kind, and lessens the burden. And what are we even doing here if we’re not trying to help with each other’s burdens?

---

It would be irresponsible of me to end, after that story, without signposting you to where you can get help if you are suffering with suicidal ideation too. You can find a list of suicide prevention helplines for every country on Earth on, of all places, Wikipedia, under the topic List of suicide crisis lines. If you are currently struggling with these thoughts, or with the conviction that the world would be a better place without you, please, I am begging you, know that you are wrong: that the world is undoubtedly improved with you in it, that people want and need you more than you can understand right now, and that you can heal from this place. Please look up the numbers for your country and reach out to one of them to talk it through, because talking to each other can get us through anything, and there are people out there who not only can help you, but want to help you. Please give them that chance.