“I thought you warned us to leave her eyes wrapped,” Physik Oeric mumbled. “To make it easier on her.”
“A precaution born of hope,” Ghyle said. “Now such caution presents too great a risk. She swoons even now back toward oblivion. We must do what we can to stop that from happening.”
With one final tug, the wrap fell from her face. The end brushed her cheek before being lifted away. She found the strength to shift an arm higher, to ward against the blinding light. She squeezed her eyes even tighter. Still, the radiance stabbed into her skull, driving the darkness back, burning it away.
Then fingers gripped her chin, and a damp cloth smelling of almskald softened the sandy crusts sealing her eyelids.
“Don’t fight it, child,” Ghyle urged. “Open your eyes.”
Nyx tried to pull her head away, to refuse, but those fingers tightened on her chin.
“Do as I say,” the prioress demanded in tones that underscored her lofty position at the Cloistery. “Or be lost forever.”
Nyx wanted to balk, but her dah had taught her too well, to always respect her betters. She peeked her lids open and gasped in agony. The light—as blinding as the darkness she had known all her life—stung with a nettle’s burn.
Hot tears burst and flowed, flushing away more grime and crusts from her eyes. The tears also melted the hard brilliance into a watery brightness. Shapes swam through the haze, not unlike shadows on a bright summer day. Only with each painful blink, the shapes grew sharper; colors she had only imagined bloomed into brilliance.
Her heart fluttered in her chest like a panicked flutetail in a cage. She scrabbled backward on the bed—away from the impossibility of the pair of faces staring back at her. Physik Oeric squinted at her, his countenance wrinkled like a marsh plum left too long in the sun. Her gaze traced his every line. With her vision always clouded in the past, any colors—the little she could see even on the brightest days—were always muted and muddy.
But now …
She stared, mesmerized by the shining blue hue of the man’s eyes, far brighter than any clear sky she had ever experienced.
As the physik turned to his neighbor, his bald pate reflected the sunlight through the room’s lone window. “It seems you were correct, Prioress Ghyle,” he said.
Ghyle kept her focus on Nyx. “You can see us. Is that not true, child?”
Dumbfounded, Nyx simply gaped. The prioress was darkly complexioned, her skin far darker than Nyx had imagined. She knew the prioress had been born to the south, in the lands of the Klashe. The woman’s hair, though, was white as chalk and bound up in a nest of braids atop her head. Her eyes were far greener than any sunlit pond.
The prioress must have noted Nyx’s attention. A smile played about the corners of her lips. Relief softened the prioress’s eyes. Though, in truth, Nyx could not be sure of any of this. Having never witnessed the subtlety of expressions, she could not know for certain if she was interpreting them correctly.
Still, Nyx finally answered the prioress’s question with a nod.
I can see.
While Nyx should have been joyous at such an impossibility, she now only felt dread. Somewhere in the darkness she had left behind, she could still hear screams rising from those shadows.
As if the prioress sensed her inner terror, the smile faded on the woman’s face. She patted Nyx’s hand. “You should mend well from here. I believe you’ve finally found your path out of the poison’s oblivion.”
Ever obedient and not wanting to appear ungrateful, Nyx nodded again.
But it was not how she felt.
Though she could miraculously see, she felt more lost than ever.
* * *
THE NEXT DAY, Nyx sipped at a thin porridge, cradling the bowl between her palms. Still weak, she needed both hands to hold the bowl steady.
Her dah sat on a stool beside her cot, leaning his chin atop his cane. He gazed at her with an encouraging grin, but his eyes and brow remained pinched. “It’s a broth of hen bones mixed with oat grindings.” He glanced to the door and back again, then leaned closer. “With a few splashes of wine cider. Should square you off right quick, I just knows it will.”
Hope rang in his last words.
“I’m sure it will.” To reassure him, she drew in another long sip before turning to set the bowl on a nearby table.
As she straightened around, she took in the small cell in the physik’s ward, with its lichen-crusted stone walls, its high narrow window, and rafters hung with drying herbs. A lone flame danced wanly atop a tarnished oil lamp. She still felt overwhelmed by the very sight and details of the room: the wavering strands of spider silk in the corner, the dust motes floating in the sunlight, the whorled grain of the wooden rafters. It was too much. How did one cope with such an overload of details all the time? She found it dizzying and wrong.
Instead, she turned and concentrated on her dah’s eyes. She tried to soothe the worry shining there. “They’re taking good care of me here. Nearly the entire horde of the school’s physiks, alchymists, and hieromonks have traipsed through here.”
In fact, they had barely let her sleep.
Perhaps they fear I will never wake again and dared not lose this opportunity.
They hadn’t even let her dah visit until this morning. Once allowed, he had spared not a moment. With the day’s first bell, he had hobbled his way up to the fourth tier—where the Cloistery’s wards were housed—accompanied by Nyx’s brother. Bastan had carried a huge pot of porridge, resting in a bucket of coals to keep it all warm.
Her brother had already returned home to join their older brother in taking care of their duties at the paddocks. Apparently even someone returning from the dead did not slow the pace of the busy trading post. Still, before leaving, Bastan had hugged her in his beefy arms, grabbed her cheeks in his palms, and stared deeply at her.
“Don’t go a-scaring us again,” he had warned her. “Next time you go about tangling with a M?r bat, you fetch your brothers first.”
She had promised to do so, trying to smile, but his reminder of the attack had stoked the terror inside her. At least, the constant attention by the parade of physiks through her small cell had kept her distracted. The curious visitors had poked and pinched her all over, often leaving her blushing. Others had spent time examining the healing punctures in her throat, measuring the scabs, picking the edges, taking pieces with them. One pair—bent-backed with age—had placed leeches on her wrists and ankles, then whisked off excitedly with their blood-bloated slugs.
Prioress Ghyle sometimes appeared with the others, but she rebuffed any attempt by Nyx to get answers, to fill in the holes since that dreaded day. Still, Nyx knew word had spread throughout the Cloistery. Occasional faces would appear at her room’s high window, requiring a leap to the sill to get a quick peek at the miracle inside.
She knew the reason for all the attention—both in the room and beyond.
No one had ever survived the poison of a M?r bat.
It was a mystery that the alchymists sought to solve, and a miracle that the hieromonks wished to attribute to the correct god. To distract herself, she had eavesdropped on the conversations of those who trotted through here. She listened to their speculations and fascinations. They spoke as if she weren’t even in the room.