“Wait—”
But Melissa slipped out of the room. The door closed behind her. By the time Snake climbed out of bed and stumbled after her, she was halfway to the stairs. Snake supported herself against the doorjamb, leaning out into the hall. “We have to talk about this!” she called, but Melissa ran silently down the stairs and vanished.
Snake limped back to her luxurious bed, got under her warm blankets, and turned down the lamp, thinking of Melissa out in the dark, chilly night. Awakening slowly, Snake lay very still, wishing she could sleep through the day and have it over. She was so seldom sick that she had difficulty making herself take it easy when she was ill. Considering the stern lectures she had given Gabriel’s father, she would make quite a fool of herself if she did not follow her own advice now. Snake sighed. She could work hard all day; she could make long journeys on foot or on horseback, and she would be all right. But anger and adrenalin and the violence of a fight combined against her.
Gathering herself, she moved slowly. She caught her breath and froze. The ache in her right knee, where the arthritis was worst, turned sharp. Her knee was swollen and stiff and she ached in all her joints. She was used to the aches. But today, for the first time, the worst twinges had spread to her right shoulder. She lay back. If she forced herself to travel today, she would be laid up even longer soon, somewhere out on the desert. She could make herself ignore pain when that was necessary, but it took a great deal of energy and had to be paid for afterwards. Right now her body had no energy to spare.
She still could not remember where she had left her belt, nor, now that she thought about it, why she had been looking for it during the night — Snake sat up abruptly, remembering Melissa, and almost cried out. But guilt was as strong as the protests of her body. She had to do something. Yet confronting Ras would not help her young friend. Snake had seen that already. She did not know what she could do. For the moment she did not even know if she could get herself into the bathroom.
That much, at least, she managed. And her belt pouch was there as well, neatly hung on a hook with her belt and knife. As far as she recalled she had left all her things where they fell. She was slightly embarrassed, for she was not ordinarily quite so untidy.
Her forehead was bruised and the long shallow cut thickly scabbed: nothing to be done about that. Snake got her aspirin from the belt pouch, took a heavy dose, and limped back to bed. Waiting for sleep she wondered how much more frequent the arthritis attacks would get as she grew older. They were inevitable, but it was not inevitable that she would have such a comfortable place in which to recover.
The sun was high and scarlet beyond thin gray clouds when she woke again. Her ears rang faintly from the aspirin. She bent her right knee tentatively and felt relief when she found it more limber and less sore. The hesitant knock that had awakened her came again.
“Come in.”
Gabriel opened the door and leaned inside.
“Snake, are you all right?”
“Yes, come on in.”
Gabriel entered as she sat up.
“I’m sorry if I woke you but I looked in a couple of times and you never even moved.”
Snake pulled aside the bedclothes and showed him her knee. Much of the swelling had gone down, but it was clearly not normal, and the bruises had turned black and purple.
“Good lords,” Gabriel said.
“It’ll be better by morning,” Snake said. She moved over so he could sit beside her. “Could be worse, I guess.”
“I sprained my knee once and it looked like a melon for a week. Tomorrow, you say? Healers must heal fast.”
“I didn’t sprain it last night, I only bruised it. The swelling’s mostly arthritis.”
“Arthritis! I thought you never get sick.”
“I never catch contagious diseases. Healers always get arthritis, unless we get something worse.” She shrugged. “It’s because of the immunities I told you about. Sometimes they go a little wrong and attack the same body that formed them.” She saw no reason to describe the really serious diseases healers were prone to. Gabriel offered to get her some breakfast and she found to her surprise that she was hungry.
Snake spent the day taking hot baths and lying in bed, asleep from so much aspirin. That was the effect it had on her, at least. Every so often Gabriel came in and sat with her for a while, or Larril brought a tray, or Brian reported on how the mayor was getting along. Gabriel’s father had not needed Snake’s care since the night he had tried to get up; Brian was a much better nurse than she.
She was anxious to leave, anxious to cross the valley and the next ridge of mountains, anxious to get started on her trip to the city. Its potentialities fascinated her. And she was anxious to leave the mayor’s castle. She was as comfortable as she had ever been, even back home in the healers’ station. Yet the residence was an unpleasant place in which to live: familiarity with it brought a clearer perception of the emotional strains between the people. There was too much building and not enough family; too much power and no protection against it. The mayor kept his strengths to himself, without passing them on, and Ras’s strength was misused. As much as Snake wanted to leave, she did not know how she could without doing something for Melissa. Melissa…
The mayor had a library, and Larril had brought Snake some of its books. She tried to read. Ordinarily she would have absorbed several in a day, reading much too fast, she knew, for proper appreciation. But this time she was bored and restless and distracted and disturbed.
Midafternoon. Snake got up and limped to a chair by the window where she could look out over the valley. Gabriel was not even here to talk to, for he had gone to Mountainside to give out the description of the crazy. She hoped someone would find the madman, and she hoped he could be helped. A long trip lay ahead of her and she did not relish the thought of having to worry about her pursuer the whole time. This season of the year she would find no caravans heading toward the city; she would travel alone or not at all.
Grum’s invitation to stay the winter at her village was even more attractive now. But the idea of spending half a year crippled in her profession, without knowing whether she would ever be able to redeem herself, was unendurable. She would go to the city, or she would return to the healers’ station and receive her teachers’ judgment.
Grum. Perhaps Melissa could go to her, if Snake could free the child from Mountainside. Grum was neither beautiful nor obsessed with physical beauty; Melissa’s scars would not repel her.
But it would take days to send a message to Grum and receive an answer, for her village lay far to the north. Snake had to admit to herself, too, that she did not know Grum well enough to ask her to take on a responsibility like this one. Snake sighed and combed her fingers through her hair, wishing the problem would submerge in her subconscious and reemerge solved, like a dream. She stared around the room as if something in it would tell her what to do.
The table by the window held a basket of fruit, a plate of cookies, cheese, and a tray of small meat pies. The mayor’s staff was too generous in its treatment of invalids; during the long day Snake had not even had the diversion of waiting for and looking forward to meals. She had urged Gabriel, and Larril and Brian and the other servants who had come to make the bed, polish the windows, brush away the crumbs (she still had no idea how many people worked to manage the residence and to serve Gabriel and his father; every time she learned another name a new face would appear) to help themselves to the treats, but most of the serving dishes were still almost full.
On impulse, Snake emptied the basket of all but the most succulent pieces of fruit, then refilled it with cookies and cheese and meat pies wrapped in napkins. She started to write a note, changed her mind, and drew a coiled serpent on a bit of paper. She folded the slip in among the bundles and tucked a napkin over everything, then rang the call-bell.