41. Stitches
Stitches
He came to as they carried him through Maggarie’s door.
Half-carried, half-dragged, an arm over Sam’s shoulders and an arm over Jeremiah’s. He got his good leg under him and pushed.
The two of them felt it and let him take some of his own weight, one on each side, ready to catch him if it folded.
The house was built for the work she did. A small front room with a bench along one wall, then a short hall with doors off it.
The place smelled of dried herbs and lamp oil and the iron tang of old blood scrubbed out of wood, and under all of it the warmth of a stove kept burning for whoever the night carried to the door.
Maggarie came out of one of the rooms, grey and small and sharp-eyed, and looked him over all at once and without hurry.
“Kitchen,” she said. “Table’s ready.”
“Kitchen’ll do,” Kain said.
They got him as far as the kitchen door. The table inside had been scrubbed and cleared, laid with a clean cloth, and a row of tools sat on a second cloth beside it in good order.
Word had reached her ahead of him. Somebody had ridden in faster than a half-dead man on a tired horse.
“One of you,” Maggarie said. “Not both. He’s wide enough without two of you crowding my floor.”
Sam stepped back into the hall.
Jeremiah got Kain up onto the table.
A lamp burned low on a shelf above the basin, and the stove put a steady heat against his side. He set his eyes on the row of clean tools laid out on the second cloth and counted them.
Counting was a thing a man could do while he was being taken apart and sewn back together.
Maggarie set her hands on him and went down him piece by piece.
The arm. The ribs along the left side. The leg. The back, when she leaned him forward to look at it.
She didn’t say what she found while she was finding it.
“What’re we looking at?” she said, though she could see it well enough.
“Better question’s what we aren’t.” His ribs caught on the words and he stopped.
“The more you talk, the more it’ll hurt.” She picked up the first of her cloths. “Arm first. Then the back. Then the leg. Ribs last, they’ll keep. You’ve handled pain. This is going to be a good deal of it.”
Kain set his jaw and said nothing.
They got the rest of the armor off him, the pieces he hadn’t shed in the woods. Jeremiah worked the buckles while Maggarie guided the plate clear of the wounds.
The breastplate came first. A handful of cuts broke open as it lifted, dried blood tearing loose with the leather.
The arm pieces were the worst of it. Every pull put a knife through the shoulder.
The helmet was nothing. He held onto that much.
“Arm’s out of the joint,” Maggarie said. “That’s the quick one. Also the one that’ll make you wish it weren’t.” She nodded Jeremiah toward the shoulders. “Brace him.”
Jeremiah set one broad hand on Kain’s good shoulder and the other at the base of his neck, the grip of a man who’d spent forty years lifting things that didn’t want to be lifted. Kain took hold of the table edge with his good hand.
“You sure on this?” Jeremiah said. He was watching Kain’s face.
“Painful for him. Terrifying for you. Dangerous for neither.” Maggarie took the bad arm in both hands. “Hold.”
She drew it out straight, then back. The bone dragged across the socket. Kain’s teeth ground together and his eyes ran.
It went home with a sound he heard through the bone more than the air.
「Status: Dislocated shoulder reduced.」
“Move it,” she said.
He lifted the hand and worked the fingers. It moved. It felt packed with hot iron filings, but it moved, which it hadn’t done since the wing took it.
“You’re done. My thanks.” Maggarie was already turning back to her cloths.
“Anything else, you send for me.” Jeremiah backed toward the door, then stopped and looked at Kain. “I’ll see to your place. The horse, the animals, whatever wants doing. You rest.”
“The wolf,” Kain said.
Jeremiah went still.
“It came in behind me. It’s out there somewhere, or it’s gone back to the farm. See it’s fed. It won’t let most folk near, so go slow and talk first, and keep your hands where it can watch them.”
“There’s a wolf,” Jeremiah said. “All right. There’s a wolf. I’ll go slow.” He went out, and the door fell shut behind him.
“I’ll get to the wolf after,” Maggarie said. “Side’s opened along the flank. It’ll keep.”
“Facedown,” Maggarie said.
“I can sit.”
“You can. I’d rather you didn’t. My back’s older than yours, and you’ll flinch whether you mean to or not.”
He lay facedown on the table. It was the trick healers used so a man couldn’t watch the work and couldn’t set himself against it, and he knew the trick, and he lay down anyway, because she was right about the flinching.
“Talon caught you across the back. Three lines. It didn’t hook you, only raked. Went through the armor like it wasn’t there.”
“Can’t tell you when,” Kain said into the table. “It got behind me more than once.”
She cleaned the first line with water and a cloth. It stung and he let it sting. Then she set her hand flat near the wound.
“Brace.”
She poured the spirits in. His back came up off the table before he caught it. She put a hand between his shoulder blades and held him down until it passed.
“Worst of that one’s done.” She started to sew.
The needle was nothing against the rest of it. He lay still and let her work, his cheek on the scrubbed wood, his eyes on the grain of it an inch from his face, the lamplight shifting a little each time she shifted.
“Whole town watched the ridge while you were up there,” she said, somewhere into the second line. Facts, set down between stitches. “Saw the smoke come off it. Then the rain came and that was the end of the smoke. They’re calling you the gryphon-slayer now.”
“I had a job. I did it.”
“You did it with a wolf walking point in front of your horse, half off the saddle.” A stitch drew tight. “So that’s settled, the wolf. Folk will know it’s yours after tonight. You’ll get asked about both for a good while.”
“Wonderful,” Kain said into the table. “I came here to be left alone.”
“Then you shouldn’t have killed the gryphon.” Not unkind. Only true. “Be glad of one thing. A man with a wolf at his heel puts an end to the talk that he turns into one at the full moon.”
“There was talk of that,” Kain said.
“There’s talk of everything. It’s a small village.” She tied off and moved to the last line. “Sit up. Back’s done.”
He came up onto his good elbow. “There were three.”
“There were. You missed the third one go in. That’s the whole point of facedown.”
“The leg’s the bad one,” Kain said.
“The leg’s the bad one,” she agreed.
She had him swing his legs over the edge and bent to look into the wound where the talon had laid the thigh open from above the knee toward the hip. It was deep. He looked down into it himself and thought he saw bone.
“This won’t tickle. There’s half the forest packed in here. Dirt, grass.” She leaned closer. “And a worm. Garden worm, not the kind that eats a man. Still in there.”
She set a length of wood between his teeth. He took hold of the table with both hands, the bad one screaming about it.
Cleaning it out was the gryphon opening his leg a second time.
She took water off the stove, short of a boil, and ran it through the wound, then worked it with one cloth after another, drawing out grit and grass and the worm and whatever else the forest had pressed into him while he walked the night on it.
He bit down until the wood groaned.
Then the spirits. His sight went dark at the edges.
He made a fist and drove it down on the table, and the wood between his teeth cracked through. He spat the pieces out.
“That’s the worst of it. Here.”
She pressed a poultice into the wound, yarrow and honey, and packed it down, and the fire in the leg dropped to a burn he could sit inside. Then she began to sew.
“The poultice works itself out as the wound closes. It’s meant to. You’ll see it weep, and that’s nothing to fret over.” The needle went steady and even. “You fret when it runs green, or it stinks, or the skin around it turns hot to the touch. Then you send for me, and you don’t wait on it.”
“Gangrene,” Kain said. “I’ve seen it. Never had it.”
“Keep it that way.”
When the leg was closed she went over the rest of him, her hands down his spine and his neck, and she nodded at what she didn’t find.
“Nothing in the neck. You’re lucky there. A man your size lands wrong off a horse and he doesn’t walk again.”
She pressed along his ribs. Three on the left gave under her hands. He drew a sharp breath through his teeth.
“You’ve broken these before.”
“Same side.”
“Figures.” She wound the wrap around his chest, firm, and tied it off.
She saw to the small cuts after that, the kind a man never came to her for on their own, and there were a lot of them.
“Thirty-two stitches,” she said when she straightened up, reading it off like a bill. “You’ll keep the scars. Add them to the rest.”
Kain looked down at himself, wrapped and sewn and reeking of spirits and honey. “That’ll do.”
“You’ll sleep here,” she said. “Go home tomorrow if you must. I’d keep you a week. I know better than to try.”
“I can walk to the farm.”
“You can’t, and you won’t. One night in a bed that isn’t yours won’t kill you. The gryphon already had its turn at that and missed.”
She got him down off the table. His leg lit white when it took the weight, and he caught himself on the edge before it could fold under him.
She steadied him, then crossed to the door and held it open.
Carol was on the other side of it.
She’d been there a while, by the look of her. She didn’t say anything. She came in under his good arm and took his weight off the wall, and he leaned on her, and she walked him down the short hall to the small room and lowered him onto the bed.
It was a soft bed. After the table it was the softest thing he could remember being set down on. She drew the blanket up over him.
Then she sat down in the chair beside it. She left the door open. She reached out and took his hand and held it, and she didn’t say anything, and she didn’t let go.
She was there.
「Title Gained: Gryphon Slayer」
「+15% Damage vs. Avian/Gryphon-class | Minor Wind Resistance」