The word didn't take long to travel. Bad news never took very long - more to the point, exciting news moved like quicksilver, almost faster than an unkind thought. Bad or good, people loved to talk. They loved to share anything when it wasn't them.
It didn't take long for her to hear of another execution, almost ten turns too soon after the last (that she knew of). And paranoid though she might be, the whole decision had the feel of something pushed through, one made far too fast with lives on the line. Aishani had always felt that lives were weighted differently, depending where you were from and what you'd been born to; she wasn't sure how much that had to do with this particular judgment, but she wondered if Harpers and Weyrfolk would be so quick to send a dragonrider to the gallows.
In her nightmares, revived by recent events in all their heart-stopping glory, they certainly were. After watching her father die, frozen and horrified, she'd feel the shadowed and threatening crowd bearing witness somehow notice her standing there with them... and rough hands would start shoving her towards the same fate. She'd always wake before the floor dropped out from under the tingling soles of her feet and she fell, but it was only a small thing when every time was so vivid and so real that sometimes she'd have to rush be sick after, and awake for hours after; that even Iesaryth's comfort took time.
She couldn't accept it. She knew that when one person died in that way, it was never just one person; there were deaths that rippled out from that one, not all directly, but impacted by that one... execution. There might possibly be a Brieli-to-be - maybe more than one - out there right now, about to grow up with too many questions and not enough answers.
Who gave any of them the right to decide what to do with someone's life? The Weyrleaders? Iolene was right about that; there wasn't much sense to it, when one considered the sheer power held and used, completely unchecked for all people would talk about 'seconds and so on. The Harpers? They had marginally better ground to stand on, she supposed, but still. Still. Who could decide someone was so irreparable, so truly damaged and lost that they had to die?
Who could decide they were qualified to make that judgment?
She'd wanted that once. Before she'd truly worked out what death could do others, to her; she had no desire to spawn a mirror of herself; she had no interest in that kind of guilt, she bore enough already.
It was before she realized it was more satisfying to see someone suffer. Dealing death was making a decision that was beyond her, and it was too easy. If she had to live with herself, her decisions, her losses, so should everyone else. Another murder on the books was just more proof that things were broken, more names on a list.
« Are you qualified to make that judgment? »
Iesaryth had been mostly staying out of all of this of late, perhaps knowing her quiet support, the gentle sound of the waves, was better than words. It had been - now, Aishani had to consider.
If they can decide to just kill someone, I certainly can make life difficult for a privileged few. It's not much, in terms of balance, is it?
« Perhaps. Just... be wary of such decisions. I know you have your debts to settle. Take care with adding more to the books. »
There was wisdom to that. But who else would care? She couldn't shake the memory of the day she was told about her father, the way everything slowed and faded of color, how she stopped really hearing anyone talk because (she thought) it didn't matter what they said, she was finally alone. She couldn't shake the idea that there might be some child out there, as numb and lost and broken as she once was.
I will.
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