“Yeah,” I said, mostly into the drool-damp spot on my pillow.
“Can you repeat it back to me?” she asked.
“It back to me,” I repeated. I began to roll onto my back, and she moved to help, cradling my head. The maneuver exhausted me, and I closed my eyes. My skull was three times too large, and a throbbing mass clung to the back of it. My chest felt too small for my lungs. “Okay, that’s enough work for one day,” I said.
“Do you ever put in a full day’s work?” a familiar voice asked. Like mine, it sounded weak and tired.
I turned my gigantic cranium enough to see Liz Dumont seated beside me, bent forward with her elbows on the edge of the bed. She wore a tight tunic blouse and men’s-style trousers with high boots. Her short red hair was matted and strands fell into her equally red eyes. The harsh light from the window highlighted the crow’s-feet and smile lines on her face. She needed a bath, a change of clothes and some serious rest. I thought she was the most beautiful sight in the world. “Did you go out in public like that?” I asked.
“You’re no picnic yourself.” Her hand found mine in the tangle of blankets. “And watching you sleep is just as exciting as it sounds.”
Liz was, for lack of a better term, my girlfriend. It seemed an odd word for a relationship between two people our age, but no other one applied. She was a freelance courier, moving everything from documents to livestock as needed. Two years ago she’d come to Angelina’s tavern to deliver something to me, and I hadn’t let her out of my sight since. Besides being beautiful, intelligent, tough and inexplicably smitten with me, she was the only other person in the world whose judgment I consistently trusted.
“Now you can get some sleep, too,” Bennings said to Liz. The priestess lifted my eyelids higher than I expected. “Hm. Well, you seem to truly be on the mend. We’ve been giving you some elixirs and doing a few simple noninvasive spells for your recovery. But you’ll be feeling that head for a while, I imagine.”
“Better than not feeling it,” I said.
“Yes. I’ll leave you two alone to catch up on things, and check back later.”
After she left, I looked around the room. The moon goddess hospital was well-known, if mysterious, to most of Neceda’s population. It had been here for three generations, training apprentices as well as caring for the injured. The knot of small buildings was constructed over hot springs, and their heat could be channeled into the structures to keep the rooms at reasonably constant temperatures. The walls inside and out were whitewashed, while the door bore the universal red-pentagram symbol of the place’s purpose. It could accommodate about twenty patients, two to a room if necessary. A fence surrounded the compound, crucial since a constantly rotating population of young females lived within it.
The priestesses, called “Mother” once they reached a certain rank, and their trainees were skilled in herbal therapy and pain management. Neceda, a wide-open river town, appreciated this service even if officially King Archibald frowned on the order, whose hidden rites were the source of many scandalous rumors. I knew of the place by reputation, but luckily had never needed its services before now. Guess my luck had changed.
I turned to Liz. “How long have I been out?”
“A week.”
“A week?”
She tenderly brushed a stray lock of hair from my eyes. “They brought you in the morning after you left for Tallega. At first they told me you were dead. They kept you on sleep herbs for the first four days. You were pretty much written off, and they didn’t see any need for you to suffer. Then when you didn’t die, they decided to see if you’d come out of it. I told them a blow to your head was the least likely way to kill you, since it couldn’t hit anything vital.”
I grinned. “You’re a bitch when you don’t sleep.”
“Then scoot over,” she said, and without waiting climbed onto the narrow bed with me. I put my arm under her neck, and she draped one leg over mine. I winced as the weight came down on my injured side. “Ow,” I gasped.
“Oops, sorry,” she said as she adjusted. “Is that better?”
“Perfect,” I said, and meant it.
She rested her hand on my chest, a possessive gesture that made me glad to be possessed. I pulled her as close as my weakened condition allowed and kissed the top of her head. She was asleep within five minutes.
I lay awake and stared at the blank white wall. A week had passed, plenty of time for the trail to grow cold. But however long it took, I knew I had a date with three certain gentlemen, one of whom had dragons on his boots. Until I found them, that final image of what they’d done to Laura Lesperitt would be the first thing I saw in my mind each day.
I perfected the skill of playing dead and found out a lot. People always talk freely around the unconscious.
I learned from the gossipy apprentices who checked on me at night that a farmer had discovered me at the bottom of a ravine beside the corpse of a girl and a horse’s carcass. The farmer threw me and the girl in his wagon and brought us into town; he didn’t even realize I was still alive. He did not leave his name, and had not been back to check on me. Understandable, if he thought he was just dropping off two anonymous dead bodies.
Likewise, no one had come to claim the girl’s remains. The hospital staff did not even know her name.
These teenage apprentices found all this very mysterious and sexy. Their speculation about me and my occupation (“He’s a sword jockey, you know; you don’t get to be one unless you’re really good with women…”) made it a challenge to keep the smile off my allegedly sleeping face. I had a hard time picturing tough, matronly Mother Bennings ever being one of these giggly girls.
Although my rescuer was a no-show, I learned that someone else had stopped in to check on me. My second conscious morning I overheard Bennings tell Liz about “that man” who had been around to ask about me again. They stepped outside to discuss it in the hall, but since they left the door open, I still heard everything. My first thought was of the man with dragon boots, but this didn’t sound like him.
“Did he leave a name this time?” Liz asked.
“No, he just asked if Mr. LaCrosse was going to be okay. I was with a patient and couldn’t talk to him, but the girl who did said he seemed kind of squirrelly. Sound like anyone your friend might know?”
“Sounds like most of the people he might know,” Liz said wryly. “You said he was an older man?”
“That’s what the girls said. I told them to come get me if he shows up again, even if I’m with someone.”
If Liz replied, I didn’t hear it. Concentrating so hard made my head hurt, so I drifted back to sleep.
On the third morning Liz touched my hand and, when I opened my eyes, said, “You’ve got a visitor.”
She stepped aside, and a wide-shouldered man with heavy eyebrows moved closer. He looked me over, then nodded at the bandages wound tight to my skull. “I’ve seen better heads on cabbage.”
“Every time you look in the mirror,” I said.
Gary Bunson managed a smile. It was not an expression his features accepted willingly. He was the local head magistrate, a king’s agent content to let Neceda’s vices run rampant as long as no one got hurt and he got his cut. He was younger than me, but his ravaged complexion and gray-streaked hair made him look several years older, and his uniform always seemed too large, as if he were gradually wasting away inside it. He could be as vicious as a snapping turtle, but preferred the tortoise approach: slow, steady and willing to withdraw into his shell if things got sticky. He said, “I would’ve hoped that a good blow to the head would’ve made you funnier.”
“We can try a blow to your head next time.” I slid up into something like a seated position. “So what happened to me?”