He tried to crawl after her even then, but the leg was hanging by a thread. His body stiffened, and he made a sudden sound-a croaking scream, and life came back into the flat stare, as if the man had been poured back into himself and was suddenly alone in his skull once more, naked before the pain of what had been done to his body. Then he went limp.
Ritva put the point of her sword into the soil, kneeling and holding on to the quillions, breath whooping in and out as she struggled not to vomit or give way. Her vision narrowed in to a dim tunnel that was muddy colored at the edges. When she could stand she went to Mary and knelt beside her. Her twin was lying curled around herself, hands across her face, making small sounds through her clenched teeth.
"Let me see it," Ritva said, pulling at her hands. "Let me see it!"
"I killed him. Then he hit me," she mumbled, and let her twin pull the hands away.
The face turned up to the rain was her own… or it had been. Now there was a slash running down from just above the nose to the left cheek, and the clear matter of the eye was mixed with the blood.
"I'll get the kit," Ritva said, swallowing.
They had some morphine left, though not much. She tried to stand and nearly collapsed herself as she put her weight on her left arm.
The bloodied hands caught at her. "I killed him. Then he hit me."
A dog barked, a wooorugh of greeting and of alarm at the scents of pain and injury. Ritva forced her eyes open, and saw Garbh dancing before her horse, fur bristling.
"Mother of God, what happened to Mary?" Ingolf's rough voice asked.
The sound took a minute to penetrate the fog of cold and exhaustion that wrapped Ritva's mind more thickly than the building snow-storm did the forest around. The Richlander caught at the bridle of her horse; Ritva swayed in the saddle, automatically tightening her grip on her sister who rode before her. The other twin's face was a mass of bandages-that helped keep her warm, too, along with the cocoon of blankets she'd rigged, and Ritva's own body heat, though she was shaking with a chill that seemed to go straight to her gut and spine and into her head.
Their campsite was hidden in a hollow, a set of dome-shaped shelters of tight-woven pine branches; the snow was starting to catch on them, turning them into white curves, and flakes hissed as they were blown sideways under the hood of the same construction that covered their fire. More slanted down out of darkness, like ribbons of white between the tall slim mountain pines. Everyone else came boiling up; some asking questions, Edain grimly silent and moving like a windup toy in the old stories. He silently unslung the quartered deer from the led horse and took it over to the hearth and set to his share of the other chores.
Ingolf lifted Mary out of her arms. Odard and Fred and Mathilda caught Ritva as she started to topple, tended to the horses, half carried her over to the largest shelter and through the low door of blankets and branches. It was warm within-warmer, at least-with rocks heated in the fire and changed as they began to cool. Father Ignatius began to unwrap the bandages around Mary's head; someone helped Ritva pull off her wet gloves and thrust a mug of hot broth into her hands, and she managed to wrap her fingers around it before it spilled. The liquid almost scorched her mouth, but she could feel every drop of it as it made its way down her gullet and into her nearly empty stomach. She'd eaten the deer's liver, raw, but nothing else in the…
"How long?" she asked, through chattering teeth.
Another mug of the broth came, and she was suddenly aware of the salty aroma of the boiled-down jerky and minced squirrel. She forced herself to sip, and help as others got her wet clothes off and herself into her sleeping bag; more of the hot rocks went into that as well, wrapped in her spare clothes. Her mind began to function again as her core temperature rose, enough to be conscious of how weary she was, and even of how the light of the lantern slung from the apex of the shelter jerked and twisted on the anxious faces around her. The pine scent was overwhelmingly strong, like a cool cloth on a fevered brow.
"You've been gone a day past when we expected," Ingolf said. "What the hell happened?"
She described it in short words, ending with: "They're not going to follow us anymore. But the warlock and the lunatic with the badges left a blazed trail to where Mary and I met them. That's only twelve, fourteen miles east. How's Rudi?"
The others remained silent, silent as the blanket-bundled form who lay on his stomach not far away. Father Ignatius said from where he worked:
"He's no worse… well, perhaps not much worse. The antibiotic cream is containing the infection, but the wound in his back in particular doesn't want to heal… of course, the conditions haven't been very good for convalescence."
His breath sucked in as he undid the last of the bandages. Everyone looked; Frederick Thurston winced and looked away almost immediately, but he was the youngest of them.
"I'll have to remove the remains of the eye, cleanse and stitch. The wound is already angry… I wouldn't have expected that, so soon and in cold weather."
Ritva blinked. "I cleaned it and packed it with the powder!"
Ignatius nodded, hands busy. Mary stirred, and gave a stifled shriek as she came aware again, then subsided into a tense shivering quiet.
"Can you hear me?" the warrior-priest said, as he swabbed her face.
Ingolf was on her other side. The cornflower-blue eye swiveled from the cleric to him, then to the rest of them, and to Ritva, and she sighed. Her hand came up, and the Easterner took it.
"I… can hear you. It's seeing you that's a problem! How come there's two of you when I've got only one eye left?" Mary said, and bared her teeth in what might have been a smile.
Ignatius nodded sober approval, took the vial of morphine from the kit, frowned a little as he saw the level, and then began filling a hypodermic. Ritva remembered bargaining for the precious painkiller in Bend, with Mary as the other half of her…
"I can't use too much of this," he said, as someone came in with a kettle of boiling water and poured it into a shallow basin; the shelter was already set up as a sickroom for Rudi. "I'm afraid there will be some pain."
"Alae, duh," Mary said.
Ritva flogged herself into wakefulness while the work went on; her sister's other hand was in hers, and the bones of Ritva's creaked under the pressure of her grip. Ingolf sat at the other. When it was over, he helped wipe away the sweat of agony.
"Feels… like nice… stitching," Mary said, timing the words to her breath to control it. "We never were… good at embroidery."
"I've used some of the numbing oil," Ignatius said. "You should sleep now, my daughter."
"Thanks," she whispered. Then her eyelid fluttered. "Guess… I can live with… one eye."
"No," Ritva said. "You'll have three, sis."
"Five," Ingolf said.
He waited until her breathing grew regular, then tucked the hands inside the sleeping bag.
"How soon can she be moved?" he asked the priest.
"Ideally… not for weeks," Ignatius said, and then shrugged wryly as he tossed the last of the soiled cloths into a bowl. "But moving her will be much less risk than moving Rudi."
Ingolf's battered face closed in like a fist. "We have to. Move 'em both. Twelve miles isn't enough, even with the storm to cover our tracks."