The prospect of visitors and questioning nauseated me. “I thank you for the offer, lady, but I doubt Kemen Sky Lord himself could keep Prince Osriel away once he hears a report of my state.” Once he knew his captive half Dané could speak.
“What state would that be?” Decisive footsteps brought her up behind me, and her leather gloves skittered onto the table. “As a physician, I propose dead as your most likely condition and that what I see before me must perforce be an apparition. Surely no human body could withstand what you have gone through this tenday and stand here speaking as if he’d a modicum of sense.”
“Physician?” I whipped my head around. She stood three or four paces away, her brows raised. “You’re Saverian…” The astringent angel.
“Please don’t bother me with ‘What an odd name for a woman,’ or ‘How could such a young woman possibly know enough to be a physician?’ or ‘You must mean hedge-witch, do you not?’ or ‘How could a modest woman bear to mess about with such nastiness as physicians must?’ So, Magnus Valentia, are you human or apparition or…something else?”
I averted my face, propped my backside on the table, and rubbed my aching head. Someone had trimmed my hair short again, disguising its telltale curl—so unnatural for a pureblood. “I don’t know what I am.”
To my discomfiture, the woman briskly installed herself in front of me and held out one open palm as if to demonstrate it held no weapon. Then she touched me with it—raised my chin, felt my forehead, and lifted my eyelids, peering inside me as if I were a vat of odd-smelling stew.
“For one, you are a doulon slave,” she said, as she retrieved my hand from my groin where it was attempting to maintain a bit of dignity before a stranger. She attended the beat in my wrist veins as dispassionately as ever Brother Robierre the infirmarian had done at Gillarine. “No matter how remarkably fast you have sloughed them off this time, nivat’s chains will ever bind you. I would be remiss if I did not say that here at the beginning. A fool should know what his stupidity has cost him.”
I examined her face, all unrelieved planes and angles. A small mouth and ungenerous lips. The pureblood nose narrow and sharp. Small creases between her dark brows, and crinkled lines clustered at the outer corners of her eyes, as if she spent a goodly time at her books, though the smoothness of her dusky skin testified that she could not yet have seen thirty summers. Naught of warmth or passion in that face. Naught of disgust either, which spoke decently of her philosophy as a physician.
Using both hands now and spitting a few unintelligible epithets under her breath, she explored my neck, strong fingers poking and prodding in search of who knew what. Yet the annoying agitation of my skin dulled, even as she produced a silver lancet and glass vial from out of nowhere and nicked and milked the vein in my left arm.
“What does that mean?” I said, watching her stopper the vial containing my blood and slip it into her pocket. “About the doulon. I’d not dared hope—”
“It means you’d best put nivat seeds right out of your head. To touch or even to smell them risks waking your craving again. And it means that you must find some other way to deal with this.” She blew on her fingers and touched my ears.
The world exploded in sound. Bleating, crunching, crackling, drumming…the noise trapped inside my skull felt as if it were bulging my eyes from the inside out.
Birds scrabbled on the roof. Pots rattled in a distant kitchen. Two women argued. A sick man moaned and mumbled in drugged sleep. A rhythmic crashing could only be someone raking hay. Horses chomped…mice scuttered…this very structure—a house of wood, not stone—creaked as the wind pushed on it. My heart rumbled like an avalanche beside the woman’s steady drumbeat.
I cringed and clapped my hands over my ears. “Blessed Deunor!”
Saverian’s warm hands covered mine and, at her muttered word, mercifully damped the clamor. Strong, capable hands. I would never mistake them.
“Thank you,” I whispered as the din in my head subsided. To my relief, my voice remained a whisper and not the onslaught of a whirlwind. “For all your kindness these days.”
“Kindness had nothing to do with it,” she said, dry as the desert winds of Estigure. “Prince Osriel insists that he needs your functioning mind as soon as may be. Yet each one of your senses seems to suffer this same incontinence. This muting enchantment is a somewhat brutish remedy, but the only way I see to solve a problem I’ve been given no leisure to investigate. It is far from a permanent solution to your excess sensitivity, as it fades quite rapidly. Perhaps if you could tell me more about the progress of the disease. Do these symptoms vary?”
“When I was seven, attacks came every month or two, and lasted a few days at a time. Over time, they became more frequent, more severe, and lasted longer, but still coming and going. By fourteen…well, I started the doulon at fourteen, and after that…”
“…everything was a muddle. Yes. I would imagine.” She gestured insistently toward the rumpled bed and offered me her arm. “Elene indicated that the sunlight roused your member. Is that true? Is there some connection?”
Since I’d first discovered the merry art, I’d never understood why so many shrouded it with shame. But her brazen questioning made it sound as if one could set down a recipe for desire as Brother Jerome had seasoned stewing parsnips. Disconcerted, I refused her assistance and set out for the bed on my own. “I don’t—Perhaps. The light fed whatever—I’ve never noticed a connection.”
By the time I’d gone half the length of the chamber, I decided I should have kept her beside me instead of leaving her behind to observe my naked rump. Of a sudden I could not get myself back under the bedclothes soon enough. I certainly had no mind to tell her that it was the memory of her hands had done the rousing.
I sank to the low bed—a boxlike wooden platform, built right into the floor—dragged a blanket from the tangle, and bundled it around my shoulders. I was shaking again, this time from the cold. The sun had lost itself in the gray and white world beyond the window glass.
Saverian knelt by the hearth, threw three logs onto a heap of glowing ash, and snapped her fingers. The ash glowed brighter, but the logs remained inert. “Flagro, you misbegotten twigs!” she shouted with a certain cheerful virulence. Bright blue flames as high as my knee burst from the logs with a throaty roar before settling into a tidy, robust blaze.
“You’ll find clothes in the chest and cider by your bed. I’ll have food brought. Though you may yet experience nausea or poor appetite, you should eat and drink. Someone will sit with you until we’re sure my conjuring can sustain you, but by heaven and earth, keep your appendages to yourself! If someone had found you with Thane Stearc’s only child…You’d not like thinking on what meager bits of you would be left for me to study.” The woman retrieved her gloves from the table and moved briskly to the doorway. She paused, thoughtful. “You don’t fancy men, do you? Should I warn them as well?”
An abortive laugh burst through my heavy spirit. “Not in that way. At least, not recently.” Then again, one heard so many different tales of Danae. Who knew what was true? Some tales said Danae mated with the wind or the sea or with animals or kin. My stomach lurched unpleasantly.
“Osriel has told me your history, and of his theory as to your birth. I must tell you that I’m skeptical. Even if there exist beings who live for centuries and can conjoin themselves with trees or mud, I doubt you’re one of them. These past days…if you could have escaped the consequences of this unforgivable injury you’ve worked on an otherwise healthy body, you’d have done it.”
“Perhaps I just don’t know how.”
“Pssh.” She leaked skepticism.
As her departing footsteps echoed in the passage, I tried to imagine what it might be like to yield my soul and body to a tree and be confined by its immovable bark and leaf or to find myself locked into the barren stone and blue-white ice of Clyste’s Well. I lurched from the bed to the night jar, threw off the copper lid, and heaved up bile from my empty belly.