ANNE
“What do you mean he’s not here?” I put my hands on my hips and stared at Otho like he’d grown horns. Okay, bad metaphor. I was still getting used to the minotaurs.
“I won’t chain my patients to their beds,” the doctor stated.
“Frankly, I’m surprised he lasted three days.
But even he could see his guts would fall back out if he didn’t rest. He called Rauf this morning and left with him on a buggy just after dawn.
He’s my patient, not yours. You seem to be taking this… ”
“When a patient undergoes a sudden trauma, I can help.”
“This is hardly the worst trauma he’s undergone. If you want to talk to him, you know where the farm is.”
I did know where the farm was. I’d knelt in its dirt with a man’s blood going tacky between my fingers, so, thanks, it was pretty memorable.
I nearly argued and then actually looked at Otho. There was a bull on his table with a fever cooking behind his eyes and three more out on the bench holding various pieces of themselves, and Otho had the gray, scraped-out look I’d clocked on him my first hour on this planet.
I’d worn that look. I knew exactly what it did to a person, being the only pair of hands in the building.
I didn’t argue. He needed help, not criticism.
“You’ve got a fever in here, a broken something out there, and a man who checked himself out with a hole in his gut,” I said.
“You’re one person. Let me run the dressings.
I’ve done field aftercare for years. I can help Mestyn; I’ll look at anybody else out there too stubborn to come to town, and I’ll flag anything that looks iffy.
That should let you hold down the fort out here.
I’m not asking to counsel anybody, Otho. I’m asking to be your hands.”
“The dressings,” he allowed. “Nothing else. You touch a wound. Not a head.”
“Wouldn’t dream of it.”
He grunted, which I’d figured out was Otho for fine, and started loading a kit into my arms. Clean wraps.
A jar of the herb stuff that made his whole place smell like a crushed garden.
A suture set in case somebody’d popped one.
It was the most anyone in this town had trusted me with since I got off the ship, and I worked very hard not to look as pathetically thrilled as I felt.
Maisie loaned me her buggy to get out there. She’d waved off my thanks in the tavern like it was nothing, and it turned out to be a little hover thing her husband built her so she wouldn’t have to stretch herself across a minotaur truck every time she left the house.
It fit me. Actually fit me, seat and controls and all. On this whole oversized planet that was novel enough that I nearly teared up over it, which would’ve been unhinged, so I didn’t.
I didn’t tell Remmen I was going.
I chewed on that for the first mile and decided it was fine. He was the mayor. He had a town. I was a grown woman with a med kit and a buggy and I didn’t need a giant’s signature to do my job.
And if I told him, he’d want to come — or, worse, he’d tell me not to in that low, careful voice, and then I’d have to decide whether I was going to listen. Way simpler to just drive.
The fact that it also bought me an afternoon where nobody was reading my face for what it did around him was a bonus. I decided not to poke at it.
The ranch looked worse by daylight, without an emergency to give me something to do.
The roofs sat low, built to take the wind.
A yard beaten flat by hooves. And men. Six, seven of them, peeling out of doorways the second I came over the rise, folding themselves into a loose line between me and the buildings. Arms crossed. Faces shut.
I turned the buggy off, climbed out, and got the kit up on my hip.
“Morning,” I said. “I’m here to change Mestyn’s dressing. Somebody want to point me at the patient, or should I knock on every door till I find him?”
Nobody answered. Nobody stopped me either, and after a second a big one at the end tipped his head at a door. Close enough to a welcome.
Mestyn was propped in a cot two sizes too small for him. Better color than last time, though that was a low bar, seeing as last time he’d been bleeding out on me in the grass.
He watched me come in, a flat, mean, waiting stare. I knew that stare. It was the stare of a man working out how fast he could get rid of me.
“They sent me a bride,” he said.
“Not a bride. They sent the one who knows how to keep your insides inside.” I set the kit down and hooked a stool over with my foot. “Lie flat. Let’s see what you tore loose getting your fool self out here.”
He didn’t lie flat. He watched me peel the old dressing back instead. Underneath was ugly and angry at the edges but closed. It was holding, with no red streaks yet, and I let out a breath I’d been holding since the door.
Then he started in on me.
It was filth, and good filth, aimed to make a nice Agency lady go pink and pack up and drive home clutching her pearls. Very detailed. Very much about what he figured I got up to with the men in town, and which parts. A younger me might’ve gone scarlet.
But the safety briefings on Perren had swearing in them. I have never once lost a filth contest to a man I was actively bandaging.
“That’s anatomically ambitious,” I said, pressing the fresh dressing down without looking up. “You’d tear a stitch. Which — hold still, you enormous baby.” I smoothed the tape flat.
Behind me, Rauf made a noise like a laugh he’d tried to strangle in the crib.
Mestyn’s head came around. For a second I thought I’d lost him. Then his mouth pulled sideways, and he sank back an inch, and the meanness in the room dropped a notch.
“Rauf said you crossed a whole tavern to say hi to him,” he said, like it was a charge. “In front of everybody.”
“I did.”
“Why?”
“Because you nearly died in the back of a truck and he’s the one who carried you there, and I don’t think a soul’s said a kind word to him in about six years.” I taped the last edge down. “Also I was three drinks in and feeling brave. Don’t make it a whole thing.”
Mestyn eyed me for another long moment.
And then he talked.
Not to me. To the wall, mostly, and the ceiling, in that same sideways, sneering way, while my hands worked over the wreck of his stomach and gave him somewhere to look that wasn’t my face.
The pits. What he’d been by the end of them, once they stopped feeding you enough and let the hunger do the training. The sound a crowd makes.
None of these men were ever going to walk into my office and sit on my nice couch. Not one. But a woman with her fingers already sticky in his guts wasn’t the Agency and wasn’t a lady with a clipboard. Turned out they’d tell that woman just about anything.
I kept my hands moving so none of that showed on my face.
Then his eyes came off the ceiling and landed on me, and stayed.
It was nothing. A look. He was hurt and bored and I was the only new thing in his whole week. But it held a beat too long, and it had a weight I’d felt before, a long time ago, across a rec room on an isolated mining rock. I didn’t like it.
Saved his life. Saw him at the absolute floor of himself. Somewhere in the back of my training a little alarm went off, one clean note.
I argued myself out of it. He was just lonely, I told myself, and mean, and starved for anything that wasn’t a fist. I’d read this wrong before.
Perren taught me I didn’t get to trust my own read on who’s getting too attached — it was the one gauge in me that was cracked and I knew it.
So I smiled like it was nothing, and I let it go.
“You’re done,” I said, and snapped the kit shut. “Keep it dry. Don’t lift anything. That includes your attitude.”
Mestyn snorted. Then, grudging, at the door: “Rauf. Walk her around before she goes wandering.”
Rauf gave me the tour, for what it was. Barns, pens, a long shed with an engine in pieces across a bench. He was easier out here than he’d been in town, less braced. I liked him. Which, I was starting to realize, might be its own particular problem in a place like this.
He steered me wide of one barn near the back.
I’d have walked right past it. Except something inside shifted its weight, and the whole building took the load, and it made a sound. Nothing on any farm I’d ever set foot on made that sound. Low. Chesty. A purr with teeth in it. Big.
Rauf’s hand came up to my shoulder, light, turning me. “Not that one. Rats out there. Nasty.” He had an easy voice. His eyes weren’t easy at all.
I let him turn me. I didn’t look back at the barn.
But I’d heard the size of what was in there, and I’d had my hands twice now in the mess something had made of Mestyn, and I didn’t like the connection. I hadn’t seen anything, though. It was a sound and a bad feeling and nothing I could prove, and I made myself leave it at that.
I didn’t say a word. I’d gotten in here on a hello and a jar of ointment, on the thin, precious understanding that I could be helpful and keep my mouth shut.
One word about that barn to Otho, to Remmen, to anyone with a title and every door on this ranch would shut in my face for good. And the only place on this whole planet where my actual job was actually working shut right along with them.
“Thanks for the tour,” I said.
At the gate Rauf handed me up into the buggy.
“Wouldn’t want the mayor coming out here looking for you,” he said. Mild. Not a threat, not a joke. Just a man who’d watched Remmen go cold at the sight of him and drawn his own conclusions.
“The mayor’s got a town to run, he’s not wasting his time being worried about me,” I said.
Rauf held my eyes a beat too long. “Sure.”
I drove back with the wind shoving at the little buggy and heard that purr the whole way home.
It was going full dark by the time I got the buggy back to Maisie’s and walked the last stretch home. The lane behind the square was empty and blue with dusk, and I was cutting through it toward home when I saw him.
Remmen. Behind his house, down on his heels in the alley, this huge man folded up small in the dirt. A chipped dish in front of him. Three scrawny cats winding around his boots and his hands, not one of them scared, while he murmured something too low for me to catch.
One of them butted its head against a finger the size of its whole body, and he let it.
The man who’d gone flat and lethal in that truck at one look at Rauf. Down in an alley at nightfall so nobody would catch him feeding the strays.
I stood in the shadow of the office and didn’t let on I was there. I watched for as long as I could stand it. Then I went up my stair very quietly, and let myself in, and left the light off for a while.