“For how long?”
He shrugged. “As long as I’m needed.” He gestured at the large case by his feet. “I brought supplies, and a change of clothing.” After a moment he conceded, “I might not have been anyone’s first pick as a physician. But I was the one who would come. …And I’m fairly good with burns.”
That last did not so much decide as dismast her, setting her adrift on dangerous shoals of hope. Her gaze caught on those scrubbed, thin-fingered hands. She might believe those hands, though she was none too sure of his tongue. She had no trust in this sudden stranger, she had no trust in anyone, but she was so benighted tired…
Perhaps he read her surrender in her posture, for he continued, “I should examine the general as soon as possible. I’m so sorry I couldn’t be here earlier.”
“Follow me, then.” She pushed herself up, frugally drained the dregs of her tea, and led him into the house. “But he’s not a general anymore, you know.” She had come to hate the very sound of the betraying—betrayed—military title, which her brother had so cherished.
“What should I call him, then?”
“Arisaydia. I suppose.” She did not invite this Penric fellow to Adelis.
As he lugged his case up the stairs after her, he asked, “Has he spoken much?”
“A little.”
“What has he said?”
She stopped before Adelis’s door and scowled up at the physician. “Please let me die.”
He hesitated, then said quietly, “I see.”
As she opened the door he took a very deep breath and squared his shoulders—she revised his age downward again—and followed her inside.
Adelis lay as she’d left him to go down to breakfast. Nikys glanced at the scullion she’d set to watch him. “Any changes?”
The boy ducked his head. “No, lady.”
“You may go back to the kitchen.”
The blond physician held up a hand. “When you get there, boil a pot of water and set it to cool. And then another. We’re going to need a lot.”
“The water left from my tea should be cool by now,” Nikys offered tentatively.
“Good. Bring that first.” Master Penric nodded, and the boy retreated, staring back curiously over his shoulder.
Nikys went to the bedside and took Adelis’s hand. Its tension told her that he did not sleep. “Adelis. I’ve brought you a physician, Master Penric.” The man had brought himself, more like, but she doubted Adelis would respond well to that news, either.
Below the cloth wound around his face, still not unwrapped from that first awful day, his lips moved, and he growled, “Go away. Don’t want him.”
Nikys perforce ignored this. Her hand hovered over the grubby makeshift bandage. “I’m sure this should come off, but it’s glued itself to his skin. My maid said it should be ripped off, but I didn’t let her.”
Adelis spasmed on his bed, one fist wavering up; Nikys dodged it. “Is that cack-handed hag back? Get rid of her!”
“Shh, shh. She’s gone. I won’t let her in here again, promise.”
“Better not.” He subsided.
Penric, coming to the bed’s other side, let his hand pass over the cloth and cleared his throat. “In the woman’s defense, there is a treatment, debridement, for the reduction of burn scarring that involves… something like that, which she might have seen sometime and misunderstood. Not for this, though.” His voice went tart. “If the fool woman had done that here, it would have torn off his eyelids.”
Both Nikys and Penric clapped their hands over their mouths, she to keep her breakfast down, he as if to call back the blunt words. Adelis jerked and groaned. Penric grimaced in weird irritation, and added hurriedly, “Sorry. Sorry!” casting Nikys an apologetic head-duck. “Burns are a gruesome business, I can’t deny. I hate them.”
A faint snort from the bed.
Penric eyed the heavy supine figure under the sheet. “What have you given him, so far?”
“I obtained some syrup of poppies. I’m almost out, though.” Adelis loathed the opiate, but he’d accepted it from her hands this time. She didn’t think it had quelled the pain enough for him to sleep, but it had kept him too quiescent to fight them, lying in sodden silence. Too quiescent to rise and seek to do himself harm?
“I brought a good quantity. He can be given some more before I start.”
The physician cleared space on the wash table, opened his case, laid out a cloth, and positioned supplies upon it in a precise, organized manner that subtly reassured her. He began by measuring out his syrup into a little vessel with a spout; then he held up Adelis’s head and tipped it into his mouth, stroking his throat with a finger as he swallowed it down. His movements were gentle, but firm and sure, practiced-seeming. Mindful, but not in the least hesitant.
The scullion returned with the first of the water, and Penric laid a towel under Adelis’s head and commenced dribbling it over the blindfold. “This will take some time to loosen,” he remarked, “but it won’t be difficult. And I promise all his skin will stay on.”
A fainter snort.
It seemed an optimistic prediction, but Nikys longed to believe it, so said nothing. As she sat in her chair, watching the man watching her brother, her head nodded, and she jerked it back up. As much to keep herself awake as for any real curiosity, she asked, “Are you from the northern peninsula? Your speech is a little odd.”
He hesitated, then smiled again. “My mother was. My father was a Weald-man, from the country over the other mountains, to your far south and east.”
“I’ve seen men like you in the emperor’s guard in Thasalon. They were supposed to be from islands in the frozen southern sea. Fierce warriors, I was told, but ill-behaved visitors.” Well, not just like him, as he didn’t look the least like a warrior. But some of the big brutes had been similar in coloration, if not so, so… so much so.
“I’m a well-behaved visitor, I assure you.”
“Where did you study medicine?”
“…Rosehall. It’s in the Weald.”
Her brows rose. “I’ve heard of it! A great university, yes?” Despite her reservations, she grew more hopeful.
He looked at her in surprise. “I didn’t think Cedonians knew much about my father’s land.”
“I’ve lived in the capital, and seaports. People get around. Like you.”
His smile grew a bit strained. “Yes, I suppose so.”
At length, done fiddling with water and oils, he took sharp scissors from his case and cut through the cloth on either side of Adelis’s face. He undid the wrap from around the back of his patient’s head and dropped it out of the way, resettling him on the towel. Adelis groaned in fear. “You need not watch this,” Penric said over his shoulder to Nikys.
“I’ll stay.”
“Hold his hands, then.”
She went to the bed’s other side. “To console him?”
A long finger flicked out and tapped her purpled cheek. “So he can’t hit me.”
She half-smiled and did so; Adelis gripped her spasmodically back.
Penric took a breath, closed his hands on either side of the stiff cloth, and lifted it delicately. The vile mask seemed to puff away from Adelis’s face like a dry leaf, pulling… nothing at all.
She swallowed hard at the destruction that was revealed.
Blisters, huge puffs of membrane-thin skin bulging with liquid, ranged over Adelis’s upper face and quivered. His eyelids were a horror, rising out of his eye sockets like round bladders. What was not white and swollen was violently red and pink. As Nikys recoiled, sickened, Penric leaned forward, staring fiercely into what had been her brother’s eyes as if he were trying to see right through his skull. But he said only, “Huh.”