22. Leah #2
He chews his lip. “I didn’t know how much you wanted me to say. I told her it was a job that needed a bit of discretion, and she should brace herself for weirdness.”
Even though I’m exhausted and stressed and terrified, my lips twitch at his phrasing.
“She works at an illegal market, and her main customers are criminals. I think discretion and weirdness are two things she has a handle on. Bring her in.”
Martha ducks into the room with a curious expression, which instantly switches to shock when she sees me. I step aside to reveal Filippa on the table. Martha recovers quickly as soon as she sees the injury, her gaze taking on a professional focus.
“How long?” she asks.
“I’m not sure exactly. Less than an hour, more than thirty minutes.”
Martha nods as she places the large bag she’s carrying on the table. “If it had hit something important, she’d probably be dead already, so that’s good news.”
I exhale, my relief expanding a little more as Martha fishes a vial out of her bag.
“This should stop her waking up during the next part, though we should work fast. I’m not sure how long it will last on her kind.”
We share a loaded look, as she seems to realize that I, too, count as one of “her kind.” Then she gets to work.
She makes Hodges start a fire in the small grate in the corner while I help her clean the wound with the alcohol and strips of boiled cloth she brought with her.
She heats a sterilized iron in the fire and uses it to cauterize the inside of the puncture—to stop any internal bleeding, she explains.
“That’s the urgent bit done,” she says. “Now I just have to stitch her up.”
I sit down beside the table as I watch her prepare the needle and thread, feeling like I can breathe a little better.
“Will she be okay?” I ask, only now feeling strong enough to ask the question.
“Wingers heal fast, from what I’ve heard,” she says, glancing up at me briefly before she lowers her hand and starts stitching.
“That’s true. A deep cut can take days to close rather than months.”
“So maybe we’re looking at a matter of weeks for this?” she asks, nodding at Filippa’s stomach.
“Maybe? This is all a bit new to me,” I admit.
Hodges hovers silently in his bedroom doorway, listening carefully.
“I did wonder,” Martha says, keeping her eyes focused on her needle. “That allergy of yours—with the demon blood? It was unusual. You’re nephilim?”
“Yes,” I say, unsurprised that she put it together. To do a job like hers, you have to be sharp. “I didn’t know until recently.”
“I thought it was odd when that man came asking of you. I told that one about it,” she nods at Hodges.
“Whoever he was, he was clever. I didn’t realize he was fishing for information about you until he’d gotten me too chatty about my allergy remedies.
” She frowns, annoyed with herself. “It was stupid, and I’m sorry about that. Were you in some kind of trouble?”
“Maybe. But nothing you told him made it worse. They were already suspicious of my…origins,” I say.
She tuts, I guess reading between the lines and not liking the implication that someone was after me.
“You’re safe now?” she asks, pausing to look over my armor. “You were always a good customer.”
“Safe enough,” I say. A half-truth. There’s a lot of danger in my life—the trials, the risk of my secrets being discovered by the seraphim, bastards like Keros—but being in Aradis is still the only real option for me.
Right?
There’s something about being back here, sitting in these familiar rooms. This place used to be the portal to the one part of my life I felt I could truly be myself—not the neglected servant-stepdaughter but the scavenger who was in charge of her own life.
After learning I was nephilim, I couldn’t picture myself coming back here.
It felt impossible. And yet here I am, chatting away with Martha like we would at the market.
“The faster she heals, the less risk there’ll be of infection,” Martha explains as she finishes up the stitches. “That’s the key concern right now. I can give you a few things to help mitigate the risk, but she’ll need to be monitored for fever and swelling around the wound.”
I catch Hodges’s eye, the next few steps of a plan unfolding in front of me.
“Can I talk to you in private?” I ask.
We cram into his box of a bedroom, my wings making it a tight fit.
“I still have your scavenging stuff, you know,” he says, poking his toe at the box under his bed where my clothes, bow, and satchel are stored. “I kept them, in case you came back.”
My heart aches a little, and I give him a smile. “I’m sorry I couldn’t.”
He rubs the back of his neck. “Yeah, well, it makes sense now. Kind of. I still don’t really understand why you were asking about black magic last time I saw you.”
“I’ll tell you the whole story someday,” I promise.
He raises his eyebrows. “You mean I’ll see you again?”
“Yes, because you’re going to look after Filippa until she heals.”
He tries to take a step backward, but there’s nowhere for him to go, the backs of his legs hitting his nightstand as he puts his hands up.
“Oh no, no way.”
“I can’t take her back, Hodges,” I say firmly. “You don’t know what it’s like in Aradis. They have barely any healers, and sick or injured people are expected to just suck it up or die. If she gets an infection, I can’t guarantee they’d do anything to help her.”
“What am I supposed to do?” he asks, but I can already tell he’s teetering on the edge of giving in, looking for advice rather than trying to argue with me. “Just keep a winger here, in secret, day and night?”
“Yes,” I say simply. “I’ll pay you properly for it. You can have every piece of Filippa’s armor, and most of mine too. That’ll set you and the family up for nearly a year. And…”
I glance over my shoulder, thinking. “I’ll give you some of my feathers.”
His face crumples with outrage. “What the fuck, Leah? I’m not going to make you pluck out a part of yourself.” Then he deflates, the fight going out of him. “I’ll do it, of course. But the armor is more than payment enough—don’t you dare touch your wings.”
“Good,” I say, smiling. “Because from what I’ve seen, it really fucking hurts plucking feathers.”
Then I step forward and pull him into a hug. He accepts it awkwardly, not seeming to know where to put his hands with my wings rising up behind me. Finally, he settles for patting me lightly on my shoulder.
“You can send me updates through the rift. Leah Illidore at Artos Academy. There’s a regular messaging service that runs from Aradis to Strata every day.
I doubt anyone will pay much attention to a nephilim who grew up in Strata getting the odd letter from here, but don’t write anything incriminating, just in case. ”
I should send a letter to Evie, I realize.
I kept myself from contacting her when I was avoiding Syrus—he knew about Evie and I didn’t want her to become a way for him to get to me.
But now we’re working together again, there’s no reason I can’t give my little sister some reassurance I’m alive and okay.
When Hodges and I emerge from his room, Martha’s packing up her things.
“I’ve never treated her kind before,” she says. “But it didn’t seem so different. I hope she heals well.” She examines Filippa’s face. “She’s so young.”
“About a hundred and twenty, actually,” I say with a small smile. “But yes, she’s basically about as mature as Hodges here, which is to say, not very mature at all.”
“Hey,” he elbows me in the side just like he used to, the awkwardness of my new ephilium form forgotten for a moment.
“Now, about payment,” I say. “I don’t have any coin. But I can give you my helmet. That would go for a good price at the Three Bridges.”
Martha looks unenthused—trading winger objects like that is more of a scavenger thing, I guess—and then I remember one of our exchanges from many months ago, when I bartered with her for my allergy medicine.
“Hold on a moment,” I say, ducking back into Hodges’s room and closing the door behind me. I crouch down to the box under the bed and pull out six jars from my satchel. I always kept extras here ready.
It takes a few minutes, but soon I’m opening the door again, jars balanced in my arms.
“Here,” I say, placing them on the table, now dark with swirling shadow. The shadow itself will dissipate soon, but I know the mist it leaves behind is very useful in Martha’s medicines.
Hodges’s eyes narrow. He knows I wasn’t doing any collecting on the battlefield. Wisely, he doesn’t say anything.
“Will that be enough to cover your labor?” I ask.
Martha eyes the jars excitedly. “Oh yes. I can do so much with these! Thank you.”
“No, thank you,” I say sincerely. “I don’t know what we would’ve done without you.”
“She should wake up in the next twelve hours. If she doesn’t, come find me,” she says, opening up her bag and loading the jars in carefully so they don’t bang against each other. Her hand hovers over something, and then she pulls out a familiar vial and a jar of balm.
“Here.” She offers them to me. “These should fix that nasty rash and those scratches on your neck.”
I’d almost forgotten about the itchiness on my face from where the demon blood got on me.
I gratefully accept both, and Martha takes her leave.
When she opens the door, I see the sun is starting to set in Strata.
I need to get going. If I’m not back in Aradis soon, the ephilium might start to get suspicious.
After all, I’m technically supposed to be under watch until I prove myself loyal to Aradis.
It won’t help my cause if they think I’ve fled to Strata, even if I come back eventually.
But if I go now, I can still chalk my absence up to a battle injury that slowed me down enough to miss the rift.
I use the medicine Martha gave me and scrawl a quick letter to Evie, explaining what I can. Filippa’s still sleeping deeply, but I give her hand a squeeze and then turn to Hodges.