Chapter 3 #3
The air chilled his sweat-damp skin. He rubbed his arms, annoyed. On the ground, the man whimpered. The sound cut at the Dervish’s heart.
The last thing that cut at your heart was an actual knife. That’s what you’re trying to prevent. Don’t get soft now.
He stood looking down at the way the young man curled on his side, face against the dirt. Not a pretty sight.
“I’ve been nearly dead before too, you know,” he told the man. “Even before I was stuck in a sword. Really, you’re getting off easily. The cold has to be numbing things a lot.”
The Dervish had been a much prettier sight, all those years ago. Three-quarters dead and willing himself to go the rest of the way, but the man who poisoned him had not wanted to see beauty damaged.
What kind of angel are you?
No one would have mistaken the woman who had saved him for an angel.
She was old and grizzled and had white chin hairs as long as her thumb.
But goodness radiated from her like heat from a bonfire.
When she stood next to you, you felt yourself turning into a better person, whether you wanted to or not.
She’d have slapped him on the back of the head and told him to start a fire and quit dithering about it. He could feel the weight of her disapproval even now.
I won’t be bound again, he argued. She would have died of old age long ago anyway. Centuries, probably. She had no right to tell him what to do.
What happened to you was hard, her shade agreed, in the back of his mind. But this lad had no part of it. He may yet die, or he may live. You might trip on a rock and break your neck. The future can’t be known. Start the damn fire and give him a chance.
But … He tried to think of some response and all he could come up with was the oldest refrain in the world. “But it isn’t fair!”
Neither the mule nor the remembered ghost in his head dignified that with a response.
The Dervish stared down at his new wielder for a little longer, and then he sighed, a deep sigh that came from the bottom of his soul, and went to gather wood for a fire.
The Dervish collected the wood, built a fire up, unrolled the bedroll that had been strapped to the mule, and dragged his wielder onto it. All right, now what?
He wasn’t a healer. He was good at fighting and fucking, the order of which changed depending on his mood that day.
He’d done his share of rough healing, same as anybody, but there weren’t any broken bones to splint, and after that, his skills mostly involved sitting and waiting to see if somebody lived or died.
No, that was a lie. His skills mostly involved sitting for five minutes, fidgeting, getting up, wandering around, and eventually having Angharad threaten to sit on him.
Angharad, oh my sister, how I wish that you were here!
It was not that Angharad would be any better at healing than he was.
She wasn’t. Her hands were better suited to the battlefield than the sickroom.
But she was as patient as Death herself and she would have sat beside the wounded man not speaking, simply waiting, while the sun crawled down the sky and the night deepened around them.
He had always been restless. It was his nature. If Angharad had been here, at least he would have another guard. If Sarkis had been here …
Damn you, Commander. Damn you to a thousand hells without mercy.
… he would have put his hand on the Dervish’s shoulder and told him to be easy, that he had seen men come back from far worse wounds. Or die of far less, he would have said, and the great god alone knows which way that this will go.
The Dervish snorted to himself. Even now, dead and damned as Commander Sarkis was, he was somehow giving harsh comfort to his captain.
The young man’s breathing was steady, if shallow. His face had swollen so badly that the Dervish began to fear some part of his skull was cracked or broken.
And how in the name of a hundred hells am I supposed to treat that if it is?
He ran his fingers over the young man’s skull, finding no suspicious soft spots. The man’s hair was cut short and scruffy. Blood had dried in it and matted black, but when the Dervish traced the thread of blood back, it seemed to be a shallow cut in the scalp that had bled like a fountain.
He wiped at the man’s face with his sleeve and frowned. The blood had settled into fine lines at the corners of the man’s eyes, giving him a suddenly ancient look.
“You’re not as young as you look, are you?”
“That’s an awfully personal remark,” the Dervish answered himself primly. Still, if he had to guess, late twenties, maybe even early thirties. One of those faces that looked twelve until some switch flipped and they looked eighty.
He stripped off the man’s outer robes. The body underneath was stocky, with the kind of muscle that comes from tugging on mule halters rather than swinging a sword.
He was very pale, like skimmed milk with blue undertones, but that was no surprise given the slight reddish tint to his otherwise dark hair.
People with hair like that could usually sunburn inside a dark room.
It probably didn’t mean that he was horribly injured internally and about to die.
Probably.
He had hair on his chest, a darker shade than the hair on his head.
It ran down over that skimmed-milk skin to his groin.
Feeling rather like a pervert, the Dervish conducted a hasty inspection of said groin.
“I’m not enjoying this,” he told the man.
“I just want to make sure they didn’t stomp your balls flat. ”
“No, no, I quite understand.”
The fact that the Dervish felt better after answering himself was probably proof that he’d lost his mind somewhere along the way, either inside the sword or when the last wielder had …
Never mind that. Focus on making sure the poor bastard’s bits aren’t swelling up to the size of grapefruit.
Fortunately, things seemed normal, or at least as normal as they were likely to look when the owner of said things had been lying on a frozen roadway for the last half hour.
Certainly well within the range of Male Genitals The Dervish Had Seen, which could easily be a five-volume treatise with lots and lots of illustrations.
He yanked the man’s smallclothes back up with relief.
“You’re not my type,” the Dervish told him. “Just so you know.”
“Oh no,” he replied for the man, “how awful. I shall die of shame now.”
The Dervish snorted. Looking closer, he couldn’t tell if the man had been handsome or not. Hard to say. Nobody looked at their best when their eyes were swelling shut.
Bruises spread across the man’s ribs as well, already starting to darken and turn colors.
The Dervish slid his hands over the bruised areas, grimacing as his patient groaned.
Nothing felt broken, but there could certainly be cracked ribs in there.
Short of binding everything up as tight as he could, there wasn’t a great deal that he could do about it.
He sat back, trying to figure out what to do next, and something smacked him in the back of the head.
The Dervish did not cry out. He dove to one side, pulling both daggers, and came up ready with the blades before him.
The mule, who had just shoved the back of his head with her nose, now watched him with great interest. This was even more entertaining than when he had dragged dead bodies around.
The Dervish lowered his daggers, his heart hammering in his chest. “Sweet blistering shit,” he growled. “I could have stabbed you, you ridiculous beast.”
Judging by the mule’s expression, she was not particularly concerned.
“You decided to come see what was going on over here, huh? Got bored with standing in the road?”
She gazed off into the trees, as if to indicate that her motivations were not for the likes of the Dervish to know.
He sheathed his daggers and leaned against a tree. He’d been out of the sword for less than two hours and he was already exhausted. And clearly not at his best, if he hadn’t heard a goddamn pack mule sneak up on him.
She could have kicked your head in. Then you’d die and he’d die and you’d be stuck in the sword waiting for the next person to come along.
With your luck, it’d be the damn mule drawing the sword by accident.
“You stay over there,” he told her, moving to put the fire between himself and the inconvenient equine. “And I’ll stay over here.”
The injured man moaned again, which was exactly what he didn’t need.
There was a cooking pot in the supplies. The Dervish filled it with snow from a patch under the trees. Probably there would be bits of bark or pine needles in it, but beggars couldn’t be choosers. Anyway, bark was medicinal, wasn’t it? Sort of? Or was that some particular variety of bark?
The Dervish knew about five medicinal herbs, all of which grew in the sage-and-salt desert he had grown up in and none of which were going to be found in the woods here. For that matter, I’m not even sure if they were actually medicinal or if Father’s Sister simply swore by them …
Well, I guess I could get willow bark. Even I know that one. I just need to figure out which of these trees is a willow.
He turned in a circle, examining the surrounding woods. Willows were the dangly ones, weren’t they? These trees all stuck up in a decidedly pointy fashion. Pine and … spruce? He remembered the word, even if he didn’t have a mental image to put with it. Was spruce a tree?
It sure as hell wasn’t a willow, anyhow.
Wait, do willows lose their leaves in winter? Crap. So if it doesn’t have leaves, it could be a willow, and I’d never know.
Forests are stupid.
Having thus judged an entire biome and found it wanting, the Dervish huddled by the fire and did something that was absolutely not sulking.