“Think?”
He picked up the bottle and squinted at the unfamiliar alphabet. “Well, take one and find out.”
Rolling her eyes, Kett took the bottle. Her Xinjiangese was rusty, but she’d learned the important words. And sadly, an important word for her was “painkiller”. She recognized it on the label and slugged a couple of the tablets.
“Brave,” Bael said. “I like that in a girl.”
“Read the label,” she said.
“I like that in a girl too.”
“What? Literacy?” She rested her head back against the edge of the bath.
He frowned at the symbols on the bottle. “It’s more like deciphering a code,” he said.
“If you think of it that way, all language is,” Kett said, closing her eyes, an image of the strange symbols around the cave mouth coming to mind. She suddenly felt sleepy. No telling what was in those bloody pills.
“Very profound for someone who’s naked.”
“I’ve always found nakedness a great excuse for profanity.”
Bael laughed. “Yeah, me too.” She felt him inch closer. “Kett?”
She yawned. “Yeah?”
“What really happened to your leg?”
“Told you. Pissed off a tiger.”
“Really?”
“Mmm. It came off worse though. Have one of its teeth somewhere.”
His hand touched her shoulder, caressing her slick skin. “What about your back?”
“It didn’t bite me there.” It was getting harder and harder to stay awake.
“No, I mean these.” His hand edged between her back and the wall of the bath, and traced the scars on her skin.
“Mmm. Tell you later.” Kett curled toward him, his body big and solid and comforting. “Sleepy now.”
“Those must be some pills.”
“Mmm,” Kett said, and slipped into blissful unconsciousness.
It was a testimony to the power of the pills that Kett woke slowly, groggily, instead of ricocheting awake on full alert, as she usually did. One by one, ideas trundled into place in her brain. The room was dark. The bed was soft and warm, and the sheets smelled sweet and clean.
Nuala’s house? She sniffed at some other scent that drifted over the bed, something slightly cloying, like jasmine or some other flower. But Nuala wasn’t inclined to leave flowers in Kett’s room, which usually only smelled of leather and wood polish. Besides, she hadn’t been to Elvyrn in ages.
The mattress dipped with someone else’s weight. Kett’s eyebrows rose in the dark. Someone big. Someone male. Well, it was nice to know she hadn’t switched sides. Someone-
Oh yeah. Now she remembered. Bael. The silver chain. The cave. The burnt remains.
Kett lay still for a while, frowning. What the fuck had that whole thing been about? She had woken in some pretty interesting circumstances in her life-once, memorably, to find that she’d recently been dead-but they’d generally been reasonably traceable. Last thing she remembered before the cave was performing for the Maharaja and his family, then going to bed in the modest suite provided for her in his palace. She’d been thinking about the journey home and planning to get up reasonably early to make a head start.
She sure as hell didn’t remember crossing the Realm, taking off her clothes and wandering into a cave, chaining herself to a naked hottie and suspending herself from the ceiling. That was the sort of thing, Kett figured, that ought to stick in your mind.
She shifted, her leg aching. Probably she ought to get up and see if there was any liniment on that tray of medical supplies. Did Miho know about her leg? Well, she must have seen the scar earlier. It was hard to miss.
The bed was warm and soft, and she didn’t really feel inclined to move. On the other hand, the longer she just lay there without sorting her leg out, the worse it would get. It was like an old cartwheel, she thought grumpily as she pushed the covers back. Keep it well oiled or it’d rust over.
This was proven when she swung her leg out of bed, tested its strength and found it to be totally useless. With a flash of sudden pain, it crumpled beneath her and she toppled to the floor, crying out as she hit the cold wood.
Her leg hurt so much she almost blacked out for a second, sound and vision dimming, her breath snatched away. Then sound returned and she heard someone scrambling from the bed, calling her name.
“Kett? What the- Are you okay?”
Five by five, she tried to say, but the words wouldn’t come. Breathless, trying hard to keep her leg still so it wouldn’t hurt any more than it already did, she nodded, blinking as her vision cleared and Bael appeared, hovering worriedly at her side.
Hmm. He was kind of adorable when he was worried. Or maybe pain was making her delirious.
“Don’t,” she cried as his hand moved to touch her leg. “Just don’t touch it.”
He snatched his hand back, and instead touched her shoulder as she rose up on her elbows and surveyed her leg with dismay.
“What happened?”
She took a deep breath and let it out shakily. “I just fell,” she said. “It’s not very strong. I mean, usually it’s fine, but I haven’t been taking medication or anything, and it’s just seized up. Give me a minute.”
“What medication? Maybe your friend Miho has something that will help.”
“Maybe,” said Kett, thinking it was unlikely anyone at all would have the stuff she took. “Could you go see if there’s any liniment on that tray?” Bael hesitated, so she added, “Just bring the tray.”
He bit his lip, looking uneasy, then nodded and rose gracefully to his feet. Kett, cursing the day she ever decided to fight a hungry sabertooth tiger instead of either shooting it or running the fuck away, tried to follow suit and ended up back on her backside on the floor.
Bael put the tray down on the bed then his hands on his hips and looked at her. There was a bandage wrapped around his arm where the kelf’s arrow had hit, the fabric very white against his skin.
“If you want help, you just have to say so.”
“I’m fine.” Stubbornly, she tried again, but her leg pulsed with pain and refused to cooperate.
“I mean, I have a great view here. I’m perfectly happy to see you stay right where you are.”
“Pervert.”
He grinned.
“Could you pass me the liniment, please?”
“What, down there on the floor? Come on, you’ll freeze.”
“I’m fine.”
“You blatantly are not.”
Kett glared at him. He grinned back. Eventually she sighed, gritted her teeth and said, “Oh, all right. Could you please help me up?”
“I’m sorry?” Bael cupped his ear exaggeratedly. “What was that?”
“Fuck off.”
“Thought so.” He scooped her up and dumped her on the bed so fast her leg hardly had time to protest. “You want a hand rubbing that stuff in?”
“No.”
“Tough. Payment for helping you out-I get to feel you up.”
“Perv-”
“You said that already.” He picked up a couple of jars, opened them and sniffed the contents. “Eurgh.”
“It’s not meant to smell nice.” She pointed out the right jar and Bael made another face.
“What’s it meant to do?”
She sighed. Evidently there was no way of getting out of this without Bael being involved in every detail. “Loosen up the muscles.”
“Right. Why are they tight?”
“Because a tiger bit through them.”
He started examining her leg. “Actually through them?”
“Hamstrung me.”
He visibly flinched. “Youch. You must have had a hell of a surgeon.”
Kett thought about Striker and nearly laughed. “Yeah, sure,” she said.
Bael scooped out some of the smelly liniment and spread it over her leg. The scar ran mostly down the side of her thigh, but both ends of it curled round to the back where the tiger’s massive canines had ripped right through.
“Come on, roll over,” he said, nudging her hip. “Give me access.”
“You’re enjoying this, aren’t you?”