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Nausicaa was singing.
Kushana blinked, her eyelids fluttering, awash on the pain spreading up from her ankle and Nausicaa's voice. Is your mind touching mine? She wondered, letting her head loll, letting herself fall and float.
“I'm going to have to cut your boot,” Nausicaa said. Kushana wanted to nod or speak, to answer, but Nausicaa did not wait. Her knife was in her hand, steady pearly white of ohmu shell blade – only the finest for the chieftain of the Wind, only the most practical, the deadliest – and it struck Kushana that she was no longer directing herself to relax, to ease into the pain so that she did not injure herself further. She had gone limp, resting in Nausicaa's will, her power over life and death.
For an instant she saw, as if in a flash of lightning across her mind, Nausicaa's knife in her heart, slid between her ribs with the skill she knew Nausicaa had, with all the resolve they shared. Her blood on Nausicaa's blade, and she'd barely have the time to know it.
Nausicaa was singing again.
If you gave my death to me I would take it gladly, Kushana thought. It was curious, how her lungs opened up, her breath deepened, her eyes opened. She knew Nausicaa would not kill her, but she was going to give her pain, and Kushana wanted to look that pain in the face, to see Nausicaa's kindness. Always so kind, this girl who gave pain and took it, who was no longer a girl, who could make Kushana feel as she had felt only once before in her life, with a dying trooper's head in her lap and an insect swarm inches away.
For a moment, as Nausicaa cut her boot away, slit her bloused trousers open to the knee and turned the excess cloth into bandages, life and death were the same to Kushana. There was light on her face. The ground beneath her gave slightly - two inches of humus gathered in a thousand years, it was dead, it was living, all around her plants ached and insects ate their pain.
It seemed to her she had never been more aware of her body. Never, never, not even when she bowed before her mother. Never, never, not even then, not even before, after her brother's death.
So easy, Kushana thought, and Nausicaa looked up and smiled at her.
“This will hurt,” Nausicaa said, as she sheathed her blade. Kushana felt an unaccountable sense of loss, but only for an instant because Nausicaa set her hands to Kushana's ankle and took a deep breath. Kushana breathed with her, feeling, then and there, as if they shared a body, a heart, hands and lungs – she would breath when Nausicaa breathed for however long Nausicaa held her here on the edge of divinity where Nausicaa lived all her life -
Nausicaa set her ankle, and that was Kushana's last thought for quite some time.