7. A Wounded Shadow
C ordelia was less than impressed when he made it home and told her the story of his defeat. He hobbled into the kitchen where she was stirring a large cauldron of bones and herbs—a stock for a soup, he suspected, rather than anything more unsavoury. His shadows twitched painfully at his feet as he recounted his story. His ribs were burning.
Cordelia, however, paid his wincing no heed. “You didn’t bring back anything ?”
“I tactically retreated.”
“Because of one knight?”
“Well, one knight and the three broken ribs she gave me.”
Cordelia raised an eyebrow, as if uncertain whether or not he was serious. Grimacing, he unlaced his jacket and pulled up his shirt. A large black bruise had started to form across his lower chest.
“Shadows and stars…” Cordelia hissed. “She did this to you?”
“A sail did this to me. Or that hard bit at the bottom. What’s it called again?”
“Boom,” Cordelia said.
“Hmm. It made more of a whump sound. Maybe a thwack? ” Pain crackled across his middle. “Sorry, would you mind—”
Cordelia raised a hand to his skin. He felt the press of her power at her fingertips. His shadows felt cold to the touch, but Cordelia’s powers felt hard . His bones seemed to vibrate beneath her.
“This will hurt,” she warned him.
“We’ve really got to work on your— Ah !” His bones snapped back into place, sending a bright, white-hot pain springing across his body, the type you could feel in your teeth. He briefly debated passing out, or vomiting.
Thankfully, the sensation didn’t last long.
“You all right?” Cordelia asked, leaning over him. Apparently, he was now lying on the floor.
“Bedside manner,” he whispered from his puddle. “Revisiting. Immediately.”
“My saying nice things isn’t going to stop it from hurting.”
“I’ll remember that the next time you’re hurt.”
“I’m not stupid enough to get hurt, especially not by a boom. ”
“You aren’t going to let me live this down, are you?”
“I will not.”
Cordelia held out his cane—a simple piece of polished black wood, topped and tipped with silver. With some difficulty, Nico climbed to his feet, leaning a little more on his cane than he would usually. His midsection still ached something fierce. Cordelia could fix bones, but not muscle or skin. She wasn’t a healer, or at least “not one with any sense of urgency” which was a little joke they liked to share. Most necromancers couldn’t control living bone at all. Cordelia was the exception, a fact he was most keen to keep from anyone else. The punishment for necromancy was death, but if the Crown ever discovered her and what she could do, they could do a lot worse to her before carrying out her sentence.
He really, really didn’t want to think about that.
She pushed two vials across the table and a tub of ointment. “Take this for the pain, smear this over your ribs to assist with the healing, and in thirty minutes take the orange one for a burst of energy, if you need it.”
He probably would. Conjuring the sea monster had been no easy feat—bigger and with more parts than he was used to, plus the wyvern to take him there and back. The knight had given him more of a run than he’d expected.
Sighing, he knocked back the vial that Cordelia was offering, collected a couple of heat stones to apply to his bruised side, and limped off to his study, a small room next to the library where he collected everything for all his plans and schemes. The walls were pinned with blueprints, maps, guard rotas, transport logs and museum itineraries, all grouped together, occasionally connected with strings. Cordelia had once given him a leatherbound notebook she’d carved with the words, ‘Nefarious Plans’ which he was rather fond of. He found the section about the boat, tore it out, and threw it into the fire Cordelia had been nice enough to keep burning for him in his absence .
He settled down into his chair, picked up his pen, and turned to the page right at the back of the book.
Nicodemus I, he wrote. Knight I.
Let the games begin.