Nyssa stepped forward, the healer's apron still at her side, and for a moment her face flashed with a protest that had been born in the long, rotten hours of joining the Luna's fold. "This has gone too far," she said, voice thin and urgent. "She is a child of the pack—"
Vanya's eyes narrowed, and she turned on Nyssa with a sharpness that made the healer step back. "You touch this," Vanya warned, "and I will strip you of every small comfort you have. I will unmake the shelter you thought you bought. Heal her if you must, but do not interfere with what I am about to teach."
Nyssa swallowed, the color leaving her face. Her hands clenched at the edge of the apron. The threat was precise, she knew the Luna had the power to take everything from someone who dared oppose her.
The courtyard had been turned into a theater of small cruelties. Vanya called on the elderly women and instructed them in the next stage, the lashes, the ritual that would show how small defiance could be made to look like an outbreak of health.
They sharpened their voices into a chorus and brought forth rods and belts and flat sticks that would be used with a practiced hand. The first strike across Elira's back made her gasp and then cough. The sound went through the crowd like a small bell.
They beat her in measured strokes, each one a lesson in control. It was not primarily the force of the blows that mattered to Vanya—it was the image: a young woman taught her place, the community complicit, the ruler looked benevolent for permitting a correction.
The guards maintained pace and rhythm, their faces blank and professional. The old women kept count and sang as they struck, a perverse liturgy that blurred punishment into ritual. Tears carved tracks down Elira's cheeks but she made no sound that could be called a scream; the wind took her breath away and set it down small and half-formed.
Liora watched with a calm that was now like a shield, her face turned away in places as if to deny the sight. Elira's sobs were thin and ragged. Blood came, thin and unwelcome, at the crown of her scalp where a strap had stung too close. It was the sort of injury that made the body hiccup and the breath shorten; nothing like the great ruptures of war, but enough. The crowd moved around their sorrow as if it were a teaching object in a classroom. Vanya's hands folded in satisfaction.
Elira's limbs trembled with the repeated motion and the pain slowly folded into a haze that made her vision go bright and then dark in a rolling tide. Her fingers twitched but could not find purchase on anything to comfort herself with. The robes they'd tied around her were damp with sweat and the morning air had a chill that wore through small comforts. Her voice diminished to a thread and then to a whisper. She cried, not with sound but with the small shaking that made her whole body a tremor.
When they finally stopped, it was because Vanya chose to let the spectacle end. The old women stepped back wiping their hands as if they were finishing a domestic task. The guards loosened the cords a fraction but did not free her; that mercy would be a lesson later. Elira sagged forward, limbs slack, the muscles given up to fatigue. The rope's bite had left marks and a smell of iron that clung to the air.
Nyssa moved in, hands soft with a nurse's habit, checking for broken bones with a practiced touch. She mumbled to herself and cursed at the uselessness of having to tend wounds that had been inflicted as public examples. She wrapped the worst of the abrasions with cool cloth and applied ointment that stung but would keep infection at bay. Elira's breathing had dropped to a shallow, difficult thing and there were long pauses between each inhale. Her head lolled and then snapped back as she tried to follow the world.
"Help her," Nyssa whispered to a younger woman, her voice shaking with a fear that had nothing to do with the Luna. They carried water to Elira's lips and coaxed her to moisten her mouth. Her eyes fluttered but did not open properly, when they did, she looked at Nyssa like a child who had learned not to expect kindness.
Elira's cheeks were wet with salt and dust. She had been beaten until she was nearly beyond the place where pain is speech and fell into the small hinterland of not being able to organize a cry. The sight of her made some of the crowd look away, others to lean in with a tacit approval like people who had watched too many plays.
Vanya stood and clapped once, a dry, polite sound that made the assembled people feel like they had been approved. "Let her learn," she said simply. "Let her live. But let her remember who is in charge."
They left Elira hanging, a living lesson tied to the tree, her chest heaving as the cold nipped at it. Liora watched the trail of wetness on Elira's cheek and for a moment something like grief crossed her face. She swallowed whatever small protest she might have made. For now, she kept silent. She would have her cloak or she would find another way.
She needed to find a way, for herself and Elira. For her innocent unbor
n child they wasted its' blood.