Interlude: Selveren

His face should have stung where his daughter struck him, but it was hard to care about the pain when everything felt numb.

“Why didn’t you save her?"

He had tried. Of course he had tried. More than he should have, given the circumstances. “Stabilizing her was beyond my abilities.” There had been a hole the size of his fist in her side where a Cahire had impaled her and then ripped its weapon out of her body, taking her flesh with it. If Selveren closed his eyes, he could still see it.

“If you had practiced fighting, you would have been able to defend her! Mother is dead because you think healing matters. How many did you save after the battle today? Was it worth the ones you couldn’t save during it?”

Swallowing, Selveren looked at his daughter. If he had been stronger, maybe he could have prevented Elisere from being struck. She wasn’t the only loss. Of the twenty four that had left, twenty one had returned. He had saved one, after the battle. A deep leg wound, bleeding heavily. If he had dedicated more years to combat instead of researching medicine, could he have saved Elisere instead? He didn’t know. It was impossible to know. He didn’t tell his daughter that. Tilhana wouldn’t understand. She was stronger than he was. If she had been in the group that left, maybe it would have been different.

He didn’t respond. “Get out of my sight.” She said, turning away from him. Selveren pressed his lips together. He had always been more distant from her than he should have been. The same with her mother - his research took up so much of his time, so much of his focus. It left him alone, isolated. Letting out a deep breath, he turned, walking back towards his family. Elisere was their only loss today. The other four looked at him, sadness obvious on their faces, along with pity.

They agreed with Tilhana, he suspected. There was no point in asking to confirm. Better to remain silent. The five of them walked over a ridge, moving down a staircase cut directly into the rock of the mountain, down into a pit where their three wooden houses stood. The stronghold of Treventhal was built on the flat peak of a mountain, with the dwellings placed in natural depressions across the plateau. He stopped outside the building he had shared with Elisere, hesitating. She wouldn’t be there. She would never be there again. Regardless of if it was his skill in combat or ability to heal her afterwards, he had failed her. He held back a sob, and turned away from the door.

Someone grabbed his arm. He met Rensaro’s eyes. “You can stay with us.” He said. Eltadira, standing behind him, nodded.

“Thank you.” He whispered, following the two of them into their building.

The next day, he had another encounter with his daughter. While he was looking over the fields, she approached him, a frown on her face before they even began talking.

“Selveren.” She addressed him, standing up straight, her body tense. He looked at her, confused. She was still angry, that much was obvious. She wouldn’t forgive him any time soon, so why was she here?

“Tilhana.”

“Do you think you could have saved my mother, if you were more experienced at healing?”

He bit back the immediate reply. He wanted it. It had taken him hours to fall asleep, constantly thinking of how he could have stopped the bleeding, found some way to patch the massive hole before it was too late, anything. “I don’t know.” He said.

“The humans would know, wouldn’t they?”

He blinked, staring at her. “It is possible.” He said, hesitant. Much of his knowledge came from human books, but they were not recent, not by human standards. Tilhana did not know much about humans, though.

“You should go to them, and learn.”

His mind raced through the reasoning behind her words. She didn’t care about him, or what he wanted to do. His methods of trying to make their lives better were lost on her. She only knew about fighting. Something far too common. “Are you telling me to leave?”

His daughter laughed at him. “You’re so smart. You don’t live like one of us, you don’t fight like one of us. You want to learn how the humans do things, go live with them. You’re a danger to everyone here, with how incompetent you are. I don’t want to see you ever again. I don’t want to think of you. I can’t even consider you my father.”

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There should have been pain. He should have felt anger. He should have said something, anything, in his defense. Looking into her eyes, he found himself not caring. How did it affect him if his daughter hated him? In fact, how did it affect him if was here or somewhere else? He could learn things from the humans faster than he could on his own.

“That’s a good idea. Thank you.” He said, turning from her to continue inspecting the crops in the field. He could leave later, after he was done with his work. He would talk to the council about it, and with their permission, gather supplies and set out tomorrow at the earliest. From what he remembered, it would be a few day’s travel to any human settlement of notable size, and then a week or more to get to the largest parts of their civilization.

Behind him, he heard Tilhana shift, her feet grinding in the dirt as she spun and walked away from him, perhaps for the last time. He didn’t expect her to talk to him again before he left. Maybe she only wanted to hurt him, to deal with her loss by lashing out again, or maybe she truly wanted him to leave. It didn’t matter to Selveren.

Nothing he could do would bring Elisere back, but if he knew more, understood more, he might be able to make a bigger difference in the future. In a way, there was nothing holding him here.

It felt too easy. The leaders were more than happy to let him go. All he had to do was visit another Hatharen in the human lands. He said his goodbyes to his family. There was a mild feeling of sadness, but no longing. He would not miss them. They would not miss him. His daughter did not show up at all. No streak of yellow hair in the small group that gathered to see him off, just the four members of his family, his mentor in the human language, and a friend from his childhood. They exchanged simple farewells and he descended the mountain, alone.

He made his stop in a human city, and quickly moved on. There was little of interest to him in learning about the culture. Their knowledge was what mattered, but first, he had to do one last duty to his people.

Selveren asked questions at every stop along the way, and eventually tracked Taradira to the far south, passing multiple large cities, ignoring the stares he got as he went. As he approached the wooden fort overlooking a river, he was stopped by human soldiers with weapons raised. A brief conversation and they brought him before her.

“You want to learn human medicine?” She asked, looking up at him from her seated position. There wasn’t the same judgment in her eyes as he had gotten from others of his kind, only a vague look of surprise.

“If we were better at stabilizing wounds, deaths could be prevented. We don’t have much information, I thought that the humans might know more.”

“Humans are fragile.” She said, looking at him intently. Her gaze made him feel awkward. “They look for any way they can to live even a little longer. We are far more durable than they are, but that durability makes us unprepared to deal with serious injuries.”

“So there is something to learn?”

“You can start right here.” She said, her lips pulling back in a small grin. More for herself than him, it seemed. Like she had just won some minor victory. “You want to learn how to treat combat wounds? You can start right here on the front lines.”

Selveren watched a lot of humans die. Taradira was right about their fragility. They died slowly, painfully, over the course of hours. If a Hatharen could survive that long, they’d have stabilized. For the humans it was different. He learned so much, but so little at the same time. What good was information on how to treat infection, how to set a broken bone, or how to safely amputate a ruined limb? The other healers - the surgeons - gave him instructions and he carried them out, keeping his complaints unvoiced. By the time the conflict was over, he had saved more than he watched die.

What was more interesting to him was what they called herbalism. Plants could be used as medicine, affecting both the body and the mind. A common use on the battlefield was to dull pain, but there were other concoctions with other purposes elsewhere. Questioning along this line revealed the existence of methods to assist in conceiving children.

He parted ways with Taradira, taking with him knowledge and ideas, a new outlook on what he needed to do. The question of if he could have saved Elisere was forgotten as Selveren changed his focus.

Things would be so much simpler if there were more Hatharen that could fight. The humans reproduced at an astonishing rate, even for their limited life span. If his own people could channel even some part of that, the chances of victory in every situation would improve. Human armies gained strength from numbers. Noncombatants supported the fighting men. Hatharen had no numbers, and the only noncombatants were children too young to fight. They took turns in every role since they didn’t have the numbers for any other way. They knew no other way.

Instead of pursuing more knowledge from the humans, he set out on his own. With new possibilities in mind, he just needed resources and space to work. He found a good place to start a garden, near a riverbank a short walk from a small human village. It was a location isolated, yet with a link back to civilization close at hand. The village might have been out of the way, but it was close enough to a major road that if he needed to, he would be able to find people going to and from larger cities. Using the human money he had earned working for Taradira, he hired humans to build a small house for him, and got to work.