“Yeah, this is just to cover nastiness in something else I’m making. It helps.”
“Hmm. ...What are you making?”
***
Agna found her way back to the tent by torchlight, sated with herbal tea, carrying three books under her good arm. She couldn’t take notes on Kaveran herbalism to send to Lina along with her sketches. Not yet. But she would remember what she could, and wait.
The Yanweian returned while she sat up reading. She had begun with the novel that Nelle had thrown on the stack, too sleepy to retain much information from the herbalism texts. She saw him studying the title, but ignored him. He set off on his own preparations, and they made it all the way to lights-out without trading more than a dozen words.
He had nightmares again that night, the wordless, beaten whimpers slithering under Agna’s skin. She snapped awake, heart pounding in her throat. It had gone this way nearly every night since the attack. She had asked him about it, the first time. She had approached him over breakfast the next morning and asked him whether he were all right. He had snapped back with such viciousness that she had gripped her teacup to keep from throwing it at his head. Since then, she had frozen in the dark, hating her terrified reaction and hating herself for being so inhumane.
She spoke up, that night. The salve might have eased the pain in her shoulder enough to make her patient, or maybe Nelle’s hospitality had loosened her mood. “Hey. Hey.” He lurched awake, crying out. Agna cleared her rusty throat. “It’s all right. Just a dream.”
The Yanweian muttered something in his own language, like a handful of sharp-edged stones. “I... yes.” She heard him stir, and a sliver of torchlight lit the door as he nudged through it.
You’re welcome, Agna thought, but sleep had begun to drag her under.
***
“Why don’t you ever come to the bonfires?”
Agna accepted the soaked dress that Nelle held out and fed it into the wringer. “I... don’t know. It never interested me, I guess.” She cranked it one-handed, pausing to straighten the alignment.
“How do you know if you don’t go?” Nelle brushed back a stray wisp of hair with a soapy forearm. “Take your mind off things.”
“I’m only in the sling for a few more weeks.”
“Yeah, well, other things. Your sour-faced hating-everything-ness,” she explained without rancor. Agna piled the wrung dress in her basket.
“That’s because of my shoulder.”
“Ha, unlikely. Didn’t come to the bonfire before the shoulder, did you.”
“...Ugh.”
“Come and talk. Have a drink. Let people get to know you.”
“...I don’t know.”
“Nothing wrong with reading, yeah, but it’s all you do.”
“That’s not true. I’m here.”
“Doing laundry,” Nelle laughed.
Agna’s lips set in a line. Nelle had been kind enough to help her with her laundry, brushing it off with another offhanded comment. Agna would owe the herbalist so much, once she saved enough money to pay her. But more to the point, she had enjoyed this. More than struggling by herself, at least.
“Anyway, try it.”
“I will. Sometime.”
Nelle handed over one of Agna’s nightgowns, and Agna wrung it through. “So’s the rub still working for you?”
“Yes! It helps. Thank you. – I forgot to ask, what did you put in it?” Nelle grinned and launched into a dissertation about topical painkillers, which kept her off the subject of the bonfire for another half-hour.
Even though she had grown up in the caravan and had never studied in a proper school – which had unsettled Agna greatly when she first found out – Nelle was well-educated in her chosen field. She had apprenticed with another herbalist, since retired, and had talked to every fellow practitioner along the circuit’s path. She studied and experimented with new mixtures when she wasn’t hanging around the bonfire or humoring injured Nessinian healers. She was nothing like Lina at all, and yet...
Agna couldn’t imagine her sister traveling in the caravan, peddling medicine and perfume and cooking extracts to backwoods foreigners. She could hardly imagine Lina working in the herbalist’s shop in Murio, and that arrangement had gone on for years. But Nelle’s eyes lit and her voice took on new life when she talked about her craft, the same way Lina’s had. Perhaps Lina would be happy working in the shop, after all, if their parents would allow it.
Nelle’s parents had been a carpenter and a guard. They had left her the wagon when they decided to live on solid ground, and let her decide what to do with it. Agna almost envied the simplicity of that arrangement.
“So what are you doing for dinner? You cooking, or buying from Masa?”
“I don’t know. Buying, I guess.”
“Save it. I’ll make us something good.”
Agna sighed. “I don’t... I can’t pay you back for all of this. You need to stop.”
“You need to stop being so stupid, city girl.”
Agna flushed. “What am I supposed to do? I don’t have any money. They took it.”
“Supposed to do? Supposed to let me help you, till your shoulder is better. They raise you in a box back in Nessiny?” Nelle fished the last sock out of the tub and tossed it in the air. Agna snatched for it and snagged it with the tips of her fingers. To avoid answering, she ran it through the wringer as though it demanded all of her attention.
Why was Nelle even doing this? Because she felt sorry for Agna? Because Agna was so pathetic as to be amusing? Because she thought the guards or the road patrol would eventually find Agna’s stolen goods and make her worthwhile again? Because... because. Because it was the right thing to do.
Damn it.
Nelle carried one handle of Agna’s borrowed basket back to the tent, and helped her hang her clothes on the line. Because it was the right thing to do. Because they were beginning to become friends.
Keifon: The Game
In the evenings he walked, to get away from the tent and to keep his body moving in the only way it could. The back of his brain shouted at him to hone his combat skills so that he could hold off the rest of humanity at knifepoint, but the bruising along his abdomen made training out of the question.
The camp went about its business as though nothing had happened. Some of the merchants gave him weak, sympathetic smiles as he passed. Some of the guards gave him knowing nods. Most ignored him, chatting and sweeping and counting inventory and washing clothes with no mind to the ghost among them.
At the edges of the camp, whenever space allowed, a loose confederation of guards and merchants gathered to play a ball game. The third time he passed this assembly, Keifon stopped to watch for a while. The teams identified themselves by color, red and blue, with scraps of fabric tied on as headbands or armbands. A few used them to tie their hair back. The rules seemed akin to ma-sei, one of the games that they had played in the Army on their days off. Violations of the rules were debated with some vigor by players and spectators alike, and usually settled by starting over. After an hour or two, Keifon thought he had figured out the differences between this game and ma-sei well enough to follow along. He clapped for both sides and tried to blend in.
At the end of the game, Nita stripped her blue headband off and flashed him an embarrassed smile as she left the makeshift pitch. “You should play next time, Medic. Come by after the shops close. All right?”
Keifon realized that he hadn’t spoken to her since the night of the attack, and that she didn’t seem to hold it against him. “A-all right. Thanks.”
She was gone, melted into the churn of players and spectators. The night shift came around to light the torches.
***
Sometimes the red team picked him, sometimes the blue. Sometimes he stepped in late, replacing someone who had to go on shift or got tired out or had chores to finish. Nita often caught up with him during breaks or at the end of the game. He always knew where she was in relation to himself, his senses heightened to he
r presence like an animal’s before a thunderstorm. When she passed him the ball or foiled one of his plays – depending on their temporary alliances – he didn’t have to remember to smile at her. It became a reflex. Nita’s returning smile completed the cycle, pouring calm over his skittering nerves.
They almost-talked in glancing blows, hardly more, at first, than he offered to any of the other guards or the merchants. Good game. How have you been? How are your bruises healing? They talked more as the caravan advanced slowly out of the forest, lingering in the pitch after everyone else had left. Keifon learned the name and location of Nita’s hometown and the length of her service in the Golden Caravan’s guard. He learned that she guarded her solitude as much as she could while living in a mobile barracks with nineteen of her fellows. He learned that she had a deep passion for Kaveran military history, and that she loved music, but was too embarrassed to dance. He stopped short of playing the nanbur for her.
Her questions angled carefully toward his past. She stole glances at the chain around his neck until the phrase my ex-wife fit into a conversation in a way that he could bear. He did not admit to the more recent partner who had left him in shreds. Nita seemed to sense his reluctance. She did not pry too hard. She moved very slowly along a trajectory that he could trace in his sleep. She was perceptive and thoughtful, and she was trying to get to know him.
Keifon wanted to cry in her arms, or to flee until the land under his feet gave out. He was utterly alone here, abandoned with his own personal Benevolent Union-assigned demon, and there were no other allies to be found. Nita offered him kindness and attention and, somewhere down the line, when they were ready, a more tactile comfort.
She was the only lifeline he’d seen in all of these long months. His nerves were ragged. Every trip past the bonfire, with its laughter and its freely passed cider, made him ache. He could resist for an indeterminate length of time. Another distraction, another obsession to which he could apply himself, would fill the empty spaces when he could not bring himself to pray.
And Nita could, with her perception and thoughtfulness, pick him apart thread by thread. She would spend more time with him – a walk here, a trip into town there. She would give him space and not push too hard. She would keep asking careful questions. And soon enough she would see that he was hollow, that she had been courting an empty shell.
He still longed for Kazi when he tried in vain to fall asleep. She would, given time, know that. He feared the cold and isolation and murderers and coming home to find that his daughter no longer knew him. He was a patchwork creature, broken and rebroken until no glue in the world could hide the seams. She would know that, too, and realize that her time had been wasted. Nita wanted a companion; he read it between her words and in the careful positioning of her body relative to his. She did not need a broken toy.
***
The apothecary watched.
He never played the game; he was small and slender enough that no one would expect it of him, nor risk breaking his expensive glasses. He turned up in the crowd, dividing Keifon’s awareness between two opposing poles, and disappeared before the players left the pitch. In the clinic, his foreign cadence and his sharp laugh caught Keifon’s ear through the canvas wall. When Keifon stopped by his stall, Edann always had a greeting or a witty comment about the Nessinian or a foolish patient. Keifon laughed, and felt like a co-conspirator, lucky to be included in a circle.
The rest was in Edann’s eyes, and in certain sentences left unfinished. The invitation was open and unequivocal. Come if you will. I won’t wait for you.
He always seemed to have a bottle at hand outside business hours, at the bonfire or at his own campsite. Keifon never got close enough to smell it when he chanced to pass by, but the memory burned in his throat. He had not backslid since he’d come to Kavera, and the danger was greater now than it had ever been. The thought of tasting it on the apothecary’s lips made his heart race and his chest tighten.
Edann’s comments about the others – everyone, it seemed – were perceptive, cutting, intelligent and vicious. He seemed to think himself surrounded by idiots of the highest caliber, and Keifon was not quite sure whether he was truly exempted from this assessment. Edann’s cynicism grated on his conscience sometimes. Followers of Lundra needed compassion above all else, and he had enough trouble focusing on those prayers lately. And Keifon wondered whether he might be exempted from Edann’s judgment only as long as the apothecary found him interesting.
The apothecary did find him interesting, for now.
And he did not ask questions.
Edann: Weakness
In the hours after closing time, Edann’s errands led him past the field on the edge of the camp, where the guards and those who fancied themselves to be active types tossed a ball at each other. The shouting stabbed into his temples, but he did not react, carrying his sack of supplies back to his wagon.
After each item was fit into its proper place, he hefted the water buckets and headed for the stream. He strayed to the edge of the camp again on the way back, pausing at the edge of the little crowd that sat along the fence to watch. The buckets were heavy. He needed to rest his arms. The players wore scraps of red and blue fabric to mark their teams, tied around their wrists or bare arms, and a few, with whimsy that could make him sick, around their foreheads.
Of course the new medic was playing. Of course he noticed. In the chaos of a dozen flailing bodies of every shade from wheat to oak, he picked out the medic first. Coincidence. When the medic glanced at the crowd and just as quickly swiveled back toward the game, that was a coincidence, too.
The buckets weren’t really too heavy to carry. The wagon wasn’t far. He did not have infinite time to waste watching a pointless game. And yet.
It was absurd. The last Nessinians had left at the new year, and Edann was the only Achusan in the caravan. He’d intended to escape, and instead set up a perfect situation to embarrass himself – surrounded by guileless foreign rustics, so quick to smile, so quick to trust him. Those who cast looks his way didn’t seem to care that he was an outsider. Some even seemed to like it. My white tiger, one guard had called him by candlelight. Edann had burned with outrage and attraction in equal proportion. They were no better than him, he consoled himself, if they consorted with foreigners so readily. At least he knew that he ought to be ashamed of his weakness.
He knew damned well that the medic brought it out in him, that there was a perfectly good reason that the medic’s voice sometimes reached him from the next tent despite the background noise. The medic was a stone in his shoe, impossible to catch and toss aside. The Yanweian, Edann reminded himself – just as foreign as all of these Kaverans. Just as foreign as the others.
An outcry in the crowd startled him back to the game. One of the guards pumped a fist in the air and was slapped on the back by her teammates. Blue. The Yanweian was blue, too. Perhaps they were winning. He was smiling, for one thing. His cheekbone was shadowed by greenish-brown now, a faint discoloration against his dark-golden skin. Edann wondered whether it still hurt. He had been plagued by daydreams about recommending that salve that he’d bought in Vertal. He kept imagining the cool, slippery salve between his fingers and the Yanweian’s bruised cheek, a lingering, a pause, a natural progression to lifting his other hand to the Yanweian’s other cheek and leaning in.
Now the Yanweian was drinking from a flask on the other side of the pitch. Water, probably. Edann had heard that he avoided anything alcoholic, that he was a religious fanatic, that his spouse in the home country was a woman – all things that should have broken the spell, and had not. In some ways it only made the problem worse. That torque, for instance; that was part of the problem. For months, Edann had wanted to see it glinting silver against his dark skin in the candlelight. He would make him leave it on.
The players fanned out and launched into motion. Edann shifted his weight and wondered which would be worse: getting caught sneaking away, or slinking away unnoticed?
>
That water looks heavy. Mind if I carry it for you? Ugh. Edann heaved a bucket in each hand and edged away from the crowd. He had things to do, and he could just as easily wallow in these unhelpful daydreams alone. It was unwise, or distasteful – he wasn’t sure which – to stand around drinking in the sights. Or to think of them as sights at all.
The heat of the campfire made his head swim. Edann dumped the water into the pot to boil and retreated to a cooler distance with a book and a lantern. Dusk was beginning to fall, just dark enough to strain his eyes as he read.
An outbreak of cheering pulled him away from the page. The players, sweating, jubilant, red and blue alike, tromped through the aisles – back to their tents and wagons and toward the bonfire. Edann plotted the path from the field to the medic’s tent; it did not pass by his own campsite.
The water was boiling, and it needed to be put away. He moved it one dipper at a time, kettle to barrel. His hands were not shaking. He was not a benighted fool or a slumming joyrider. He would ignore this one, the Yanweian. Just this once.
The barrel filled until Edann could heave the kettle and pour the rest of the water in. He sealed the lid, put the ladle and pot away, and slid the water barrel to its place. He turned around and started. The firelight flickered in orange pools on the planes of the Yanweian’s face.
“Hey.”
Edann swallowed and adjusted his glasses. “Did you win?”
A flicker of a smile. “Yeah. You should’ve seen it.” He crossed his arms. The firelight shimmered over the sheen on his skin. Edann’s heart thudded embarrassingly. “Anyway… I, uh. Thanks for stopping by to watch.”
“It was on my way,” Edann muttered.
“And, um. Because we won...” His dark eyes flicked toward the ground. “I think that’s why I was brave enough to come over and talk to you.”
The Healers' Road Page 12
