Something about his face tickled a memory.
He glanced around the room, and when he saw her, his expression didn’t exactly light up, but it did … resettle into one she couldn’t immediately identify.
Then she noticed the purple bruising on his neck.
“Oh, shit,” she groaned.
He marched over and dropped his bag on her table with a bang and a rattle. He could’ve been one century old, or five. It was hard to tell with elves. He kept his silver hair cropped short, and his face was smooth and severe.
“… Highlark?” asked Viv. Her apologetic smile felt awkward and huge on her face, her tusks too large in her mouth.
“You didn’t remember our appointment, did you?” he said. There was something surpassingly strange about hearing such a beautiful voice express annoyance. “I don’t suppose I’m surprised. You were barely lucid.”
“I’m real sorry about … about that,” mumbled Viv, pointing a limp finger at his throat.
His mouth thinned. “Well, I’m not going to do this down here in front of half of Murk. Up.” He hiked a thumb toward the stairs. “Let’s get this over with.”
“Get what—？”
“Child, if you want to roll the bones on gangrene, then I’ll be on my way. Out into the weather. Again. Otherwise, I’ll kindly ask you to limp your way up those stairs. Yes?”
Viv grabbed her crutch.
And her book.
* * *
She kept up a running stream of apologies all the way up the stairs, into the room, and until the moment after he’d unwrapped her leg. When he began prodding the tender areas around her wounds, she wanted to knock him through the wall.
Viv sat on the bedframe, leg extended, with her heel propped on her pack again. The long tears in her thighs oozed afresh as he wiped old salve from the angry flesh. Viv dug her teeth into her lower lip hard enough to draw blood but forced herself to stare at what he was doing.
“You’ve been hobbling around too much, I see,” he observed. He adjusted his spectacles on his nose.
“Mmm,” she grunted. “Keeping limber.”
“Yes, I see that’s working out well for you.”
“Spectacles?” She hissed through her teeth. “Never met an elf that needed ’em.”
“Magnifiers,” he said. “Helps detect creeping foulness. Which, luckily, doesn’t appear to be present. The more you rest, the more likely it is that this happy situation will persist.”
“In here? I’d go crazy. I can barely turn around without hitting something. Besides, if I lie around for a couple of weeks, I won’t be fighting fit when it’s time to go. And then …”
He gazed at her over the top of his glasses, and while his annoyed expression didn’t quite make it to sympathy, it inched in that direction. “Look, child, I know you’re young and you’ve got the constitution of a prairie ox. But you can afford to lose a little of this”—he patted one enormous bicep—“to keep this.” He tapped her thigh.
“So, let’s say I take your advice …”
Highlark snorted.
“… when can I move around?”
He studied her with narrowed, lavender eyes.
“I hesitate to make the suggestion,” he said, “because it will be very annoying if you misbehave and I have to saw your leg off.”
Viv swallowed.
“But.” He rummaged in his bag. “Callis oil. I normally wouldn’t use this. You’ve heard of it?”
She shook her head and watched as he removed the lid from a small earthenware pot containing a yellow cream. It smelled like pond scum by way of raw lye.
“It was once used on battlefields where the side effects were worth enduring, given the dire circumstances. The sensation it produces is … well. It’s been compared to hornet stings.”
Viv almost laughed. “That’s not so bad.”
“Continuous hornet stings at every point of application, for hours and hours and hours,” Highlark elaborated.
“Oh.”
“However, its healing properties are unrivaled, especially when it comes to stitching together rent flesh on the quick. Were we to apply it today, then by tomorrow morning, I might approve of limited mobility. As long as the bindings are left undisturbed, and you make use of that crutch.”
“I have been.”
“Then I take it you’d like to give it a go?”
Viv glanced around the tiny room, at her leg, and at the crutch. She nodded. “Do it.”
When he first slathered the callis oil on with a small wooden spade, the sensation was cold, and she thought he’d been blowing smoke. Or that orcs might be immune to the effect.
Then the burn began to set in.
Then it was a forest fire of needles.
Then she would’ve traded it for being stabbed all over again.
She decided it was a good thing she could still see the bruises on Highlark’s neck while he rewound her bandages, because it kept her from throttling him a second time.
* * *
She skipped lunch and dinner. Indeed, she didn’t rise from the strawtick mattress again that day. Food was as far from her mind as Rackam and his Ravens were from this gods-forsaken place. The pain was incandescent, all-consuming, and Viv lay on her back, breathing long, shuddering breaths while sweat slicked every inch of her.
Pain tolerance was a point of personal pride, and for the first thirty minutes, she’d been positive that she’d be able to master the flayed feeling in her thigh. That it would dull into a throb. But the edge stayed sharp, unblunted by passing minutes or by careful breathing. Perversely, it honed itself ever sharper.
In the face of that, she clutched for the story she’d just read. It was slippery, like muck-slick rope running through her fingers. She caught a good grip on it only intermittently, but flashes of Madger and Legann, of rooftop swordfights and nighttime flights astride huge black horses, kept her eyes on an interior vista.
In the darker hours, she didn’t even manage a doze. Not really. Not well. There were simply snatches of time where her thoughts were on the insides of her eyelids.
Before the pink of predawn, the storm blew itself out at the same time as the fire in her leg, and the straining muscles of her body collapsed into a tremorous unconsciousness.
She slept hard. She slept late. And when she woke, she wanted to eat the whole world.
5
Viv paused before crutching her way down the front steps of The Perch. In the wake of the storm, the sky burned hot and blue, and the beach grass seemed to have flushed from yellow to green overnight. The sand was pitted and dimpled, as though a million tiny creatures had traversed it in the dark.
Her leg wasn’t miraculously mobile, but the flesh did feel less tender, more solid. When she tested it through the bandages with her fingers, it seemed to take more pressure to set off a nauseous ache. The feverish memory of the callis oil’s burn wasn’t one she’d soon forget, though.
In stark contrast to her first, solitary trip down the slope, Viv spied others strolling along the boardwalks. A passenger frigate wallowed at the pier, gangplank down. The bay must’ve been pretty deep. Gulls wheeled in fluttering loops, their cries rebounding off the gentle swells. The activity below trickled up the causeways and through Murk’s gates, but plenty of figures headed her way as well.