Chapter 4 #3
“I hadn’t finished talking.” She took hold of my hand and guided me to the armchair. “The quick way will be more painful. Your nose isn’t as likely to heal straight.”
I sat down in the chair. “I want it quick.”
She huffed and crossed her arms. “They never should have let a girl in the guard.”
“Why’s that?”
Her head tilted as she surveyed my nose, her dark eyes liquid against the ivory frizz of her hair. “Because the only ones who’d join are those with no regard for their own well-being.”
“No regard? You should see the one who attacked me.” I glanced around at the empty beds. “Where is he, anyway?”
She guided my face back toward her. “Focus on me.”
I stiffened. “Are you doing it now? What about numbing medicine? Or a drink, at least?”
“You said quick.” She held my face between both hands, her eyes on my nose with predatory focus. “You get quick. We don’t have medicine to spare for quick.”
I was having regrets. My mouth opened, and she hissed to keep me quiet. “Let me focus. Count of three. Three, two…”
“Wait—”
With speed I’d never seen, Isa’s fingers came to my nose and jerked at it so hard, the pain was a lightning strike in the center of my face.
“Done,” she said, turning away. “Hold that cotton there while I get tape.”
My hands rose to my nose, which was once again dripping all over her floor. The pain was a marvelous, burning sun at the center of my existence, which made me both pathetic and furious in my attempts to stanch the flow. “That fucking hurt.”
“What a cute vulgar thing you are with your plugged nose.” Now Isa was pulling supplies off her shelf. “Suppose that’s how you got into a fight in the first place.”
“No,” I said. “It wasn’t that at all.”
“What, you didn’t put out when the boys wanted it?”
“That’d get them kicked out of the guard.”
She let out a one-note laugh. “Vulgar and idealistic. I remember that. Well, you are only—how old are you?”
“I’m—”
She waved a hand. “Now listen to me, Eurydice Waters.” Isa turned back toward me with supplies in hand. She approached on her uncertain legs. “Before long you’ll become educated in this new world you’ve volunteered yourself into. It’s base and it’s cruel.”
The pain was beginning to subside, and I stared at her as she squatted before me. This was only my second time meeting Isa, but this was the first time I’d really looked at her. She must have been in her seventies, but she had a scar at one temple in the shape of a hook.
“There’s two things I’m going to tell you,” she said, pushing my fingers away from my nose, “and you aren’t going to like the first one. But it’s the second one that really matters.”
My eyes traveled over her face, from the scar to the pockmarks of some illness from long ago. Her face told stories, lots of them. Was she a guard once herself?
“First”—she yanked out the plugs of bloodied cotton from my nostrils; I gritted against my cry—“there isn’t any heroism in the guard. There’s no winning. It’s a job, and that’s all it is if you’re lucky.”
She was right: I didn’t like the first one. Though it rang of a truth I’d already begun to suspect. Still, I wasn’t sure what she meant by lucky, and some part of me was reluctant to ask.
“Second.” She pressed fresh cotton into my nostrils, one by one. That hurt almost as bad, and I gripped the chair’s arms. “You’re a daughter of scorn. Never trust a man, especially not outside these walls.”
A daughter of scorn.
That was what they called us women inside the walls. It was meant to be meaningful, empowering—we were sons and daughters of scorn, who could survive the acid rain, who had built the high walls.
Instead, it always felt to me like a consolation prize.
Survival and wheat. Survival and scorn.
The second half of what she’d said filtered in.
Never trust a man outside these walls. For the first time it occurred to me that she might have once been among the patrol who ventured outside the walls.
Did she mean I shouldn’t trust the other guard, or was there something else she’d encountered beyond the walls?
Silence fell as she yanked at the tape and fumbled to get it straight with her unwilling fingers. I watched, waiting for her to continue, until I realized she had nothing else to say.
“What do you mean, ‘outside the walls’?”
“I’ve said what I meant to say.” She got the tape straightened and she placed it over my nose with a fresh jag of pain. “Men are men. Every single one of them will hurt you like those bastards did to you tonight, and worse.”
So Isa knew what had happened. Or at least she’d pieced together enough that she understood.
The only men I’d ever really known were Theo and Aldric. I hadn’t known my real father; he’d died in the guard before I could form memory. Theo and Aldric weren’t men like I sensed Isa meant—they were my family.
I stared at Isa as she prepared a splint for my nose. Something terrible had happened to her, perhaps more than once. There was a cold truth to her words, offered with no ulterior motive. After what had happened to me tonight, those words settled in my belly like stones.
She was maybe the only ally I had here in the barracks, besides Theo.
“Isa—”
I stopped, my gaze lowering. Beneath my hands, the arms of the chair had begun to vibrate.
Across the infirmary, the jars on the shelves tinkled in a constant, growing jangle.
Under my feet, the floorboards vibrated up through my boots and into my legs.
Isa’s hands went still, and as we met eyes, one of the jars fell off the shelf. It crashed to the floor with such suddenness I flinched in the chair.
The two of us rose, and her hand went out to grip mine as we approached the infirmary door. She kept me behind her like she would her child, even as the rumble seemed to grow to a growl around us, filling the whole space.
She pulled the door open to the night. As she did, a glow filled the sky, illuminating the southern wall. We threw our hands up, shielding our eyes. For a second I thought I could see the exact spot where I should be standing up there, next to Theo.
Then the southern wall exploded.