I've lost control of my life

[letitallout]

Her ribs still hurt. Granted, it's a vast improvement on yesterday, but even the Sky Warriors' healers have limits, it seems. Aila pokes at a sore spot--not her most brilliant idea ever--and wrinkles her nose at the completely predictable pain. They've no use for her until her internal wounds have healed and her bones have finished knitting, they'd said, which makes sense but fills her with the vague, undefinable dissatisfaction of someone too stoic to complain but still cranky enough to be annoyed. At least she'll only be idle for a few days, thanks to whatever magic had pulled her back from death's gates. Everything after almost getting eaten by that drake is a bit fuzzy, so she doesn't remember much about the rituals, just a gruff voice asking her if she'd planned on killing the beast from the inside, like someone good-naturedly teasing a child for trying to heft an axe too big for them.

Aila sighs and gets up to pace. Right now she has the room--barracks, they'd called it--to herself. The others are off doing whatever mortals do here when they're not convalescing. The barracks seem much too luxurious for thrall's quarters, but then, everything here is much too luxurious, from the intricate carvings in the walls to the fine and even weave of the clothing that had replaced her battered leathers. Even the bloody floor is flawless, the stone showing no sign anywhere that a worker had so much as slipped with a chisel once. She scuffs at it with her sandaled foot. Stupid perfect floor.

The legends hadn't covered this part, not that Aila had more than half believed them before. Fenris is brutal, and tales of the gods descending to take the worthy into their ranks had at best been a pleasant diversion during cold nights by the fires once the business of survival had been seen to for the moment. The Sky Warriors had seemed impossibly remote, the gothi admitting that no one had so much as glimpsed one in generations, since long before the tribe had reached the sea in Aila's grandmother's day. Besides, the Sky Warriors never chose women, so why should she have cared?

"Oops," she says to the winged skull carved into the wall. In retrospect, she should have paid more attention.