Chapter 1 #3
Ephraim poured another cup of tea and brought it to his lips, slipping a hand behind his head to tilt it up. His guess as to thirst proved correct; Hull sipped greedily. The cup was drained in a moment and refilled and drained again in another.
“How long do you suppose it will take the bone-setter to arrive?” Ephraim enquired as gently as possible.
Hull shrugged and winced. “Before nightfall. Or so I hope.”
Ephraim understood the fae had magickal means which allowed them to travel unfathomable distances with great rapidity. Yet this estimation seemed both far too quick and not nearly quick enough.
Particularly as beads of sweat broke out over Hull’s brow.
Dr Hitchingham had told Ephraim how the fracture of a bone could induce a fever.
That didn’t make it any less alarming to witness firsthand.
Particularly as Ephraim reflected how Dr Hitchingham treated merely mortal patients.
He knew not what this development might portend in one of the hidden folk.
Still, another cold compress probably wouldn’t go amiss.
The icy sweat trickling down Hullvardr’s scalp felt at odds with his fevered brow.
The pain in his broken limb remained a constant—but, as one might grow accustomed to the howling of hounds after enough hours of ceaseless noise, so the searing agony had become just another part of the world, like the rattle of wagon-wheels over cobblestones and the crackling hearth-fire.
Part of him felt better for having beheld the wound; now that he understood the shape of it, no longer did the possibility of worse torment him.
The pain burst into something louder and brighter only when he moved his leg, and so he did not move it.
His molars ground together to keep the more pitiful moans at bay.
Giving voice to his pain would not change matters.
He had but to wait for Grytha’s arrival.
Until then he need only endure. And with seven centuries behind him, he could endure well enough.
The more pressing matter, to his mind, was how to look after Ephraim.
Hullvardr knew well that he could survive this and worse.
Ephraim, however, was mortal. Far lesser wounds had carried far stronger mortals off to their demise.
Small wonder that fear should remain evident in Ephraim’s crystalline gaze, though his bashful smile and industrious nature both strove to hide it.
Hullvardr suspected the suggestion of a book to distract him was just as much of a relief to Ephraim.
And though it worked wonders for a while—Hullvardr’s mind drifting away from his agony as his beloved’s cheerful words washed over him—his mind likewise wandered backward to the errand he’d failed not two hours hence.
His calf, clenched in pain, spasmed. It jolted his broken bone. A groan escaped him.
Ephraim glanced up sharp. In an instant the book was laid aside. His care-worn hands laid over Hullvardr’s as the latter’s nails dug furrows into the arms of his chair.
“More laudanum, I think,” Ephraim said, his voice soft but his tone carrying a far more decisive note than Hullvardr had heard from him in all their acquaintance.
Hullvardr found he agreed. But before Ephraim could arise to brew the tea—as Hullvardr ought to be doing, he the clerk to Ephraim the lawyer and more importantly he the strong elder fae to his young and delicate mortal lover—and dispense the medicine, Hullvardr forced his clenched knuckles to release their hold upon his chair and clasp Ephraim’s hand in turn as gently as he deserved.
“Forgive me,” Hullvardr forced out between clenched teeth. The two words hardly sufficed for all Ephraim deserved, but it was the best he could manage under the circumstances.
The worried furrow between Ephraim’s brows knit further in confusion. “Whatever for?”
For causing you grief. For trying your patience. For requiring you to look after me when I ought to look after you.
Aloud, Hullvardr heard himself reply, “For forgetting the book.”
Ephraim blinked. “What book?”
Hullvardr realised, belatedly, that he had explained nothing.
First he had focused upon returning home, step by agonizing step, to his dear Ephraim.
Then he had set his mind upon summoning Grytha—and even this he had not elaborated upon, and how bizarre it must seem to his mortal lover, to give over his letter to a wulpertinger rather than a post-box, when no such creature dwelled in London.
Then his sweet and gentle Ephraim had swept over him, propping up his wounded leg with cold compresses and brewing tea and dispensing laudanum and mopping the fever-sweat from his brow and reading to him to take his thoughts away from his pain and now—
Now, Hullvardr supposed he had better go all the way back to where the path began and he’d first gone astray.
“At the book-seller’s stall,” Hullvardr told him.
“He had a copy of Roderick Random, which I meant to purchase and bring back to you. But then there were children playing with hoop-and-stick, and —I didn’t quite see what happened, only—something startled the horses drawing the omnibus, and they reared, and there was a boy—I didn’t have a moment to think—so I ran—threw him out of the way—” It was a simple enough story.
It oughtn’t have drained him so to tell it.
But shivers chased each other across his skin beneath beads of frozen sweat against the furnace of his fever and his leg trembled and the break throbbed and his teeth clenched hard enough to crack and he couldn’t draw enough breath to make his speech as light and airy and sweet as it ought to be for his dear gentle Ephraim.
“And I never told you, and I ought’ve done so the moment I arrived, but—”
“Balderdash,” said Ephraim.
It was the strongest word Hullvardr had ever heard him use.
Not quite the strongest tone—that had come on the last Winter Solstice, when Hullvardr had kissed him and Ephraim thought him insincere, and the mortal’s delicate heartstrings had snapped and lashed them both with the broken ends, but all was mended now.
For while Ephraim’s brow remained knit—with bewilderment and concern alike—his voice was low and calm and everything Hullvardr ought himself to be but even moreso everything he wished to hear.
“At present, the tending of the wound is far more important than its origins. There will be time enough for you to tell me the whole of it when you’re feeling more yourself.
” A wistful smile drew lacework lines at the corners of his eyes and carved filigree into his cheeks.
“When the event is far enough in our past to have become merely an adventure rather than a misadventure.”
Hullvardr couldn’t help but smile in return. If he’d had his strength about him he would’ve drawn Ephraim down into an embrace. For the moment he could only part his lips to ask to hear more of Pickwick’s papers.
But before he gathered breath for speech, a heavy thud resounded in the outer corridor.
Ephraim drew up, startled. Then, as more thuds reached even his mortal ears—a steady clomp, clomp, clomp up the stair—he glanced to Hullvardr for guidance.
Hullvardr didn’t need to put on a brave face. Genuine relief suffused his whole frame.
“The bone-setter?” Ephraim ventured.
Hullvardr nodded.
Ephraim sighed—soft, quiet, glad—and smiled. “Then I suppose I had better let her in.”
Ephraim knew not what to expect of a fae bone-setter.
He’d already begun on the wrong foot from the first mention of the trade by assuming the practitioner was a man rather than a woman.
From there he struggled to return to the proper track.
As he knew even less of women than he did of the fae, his assumptions ran thin and in the vaguest possible direction.
What little imagination he had to spare in the face of his dear Hull’s agonies summoned a wispy willowy sort of creature with damselfly wings and diaphanous garb—a sort of nymph to Hull’s apparent satyr, he supposed, though he knew full well that Hull was a huldrekall and satyrs merely his distant cousins.
How such a delicate individual as a lady nymph would do something so visceral as setting bones he did not know.
Magic, perhaps. A wave of a wand, a whisper of a spell, and Hull’s leg would knit back together in its proper shape as if no dreadful accident had ever befallen him.
The trudging step up the stair forced Ephraim to reconsider his theory.
However, Ephraim had always lived a life of more practicality than theory, and the practical response was to arise, open the door, and bid the bone-setter welcome to his humble office.
He set his mind to the task at hand and ignored the pang beneath his breast-bone at having to move even so far as mere yards away from his poor dear wounded Hull.
Nevermind that Hull had put on a courageous smile and appeared immensely relieved at the thought of the bone-setter’s imminent arrival.
Ephraim opened the door to find an immense figure towering over him.
In her left hand she carried a bag not unlike Dr Hitchingham’s, save that it was about thrice as large.
As for the lady herself, she was almost as broad as the doorway.
Sable-haired, heavy-set, and well-endowed in particular attributes which didn’t necessarily attract Ephraim’s notice on most ladies but which even he could not ignore in her.
The oddest thing to his eye was her garb.
While Ephraim didn’t typically give much thought to ladies’ fashion, even he couldn’t fail to notice that she’d dressed in a gown which might have been the fashion some fifty years ago, if not more; the fashion of his youth, which made him feel very old and yet young again in the same moment.
The second-oddest thing was that she appeared to be otherwise a perfectly unremarkable mortal woman.