“And you’ll come back the next two mornings to apply the medicine to my foot?” Citrice asked. “Or should I just have you transferred to my personal staff to be available when I need you?”
“With my lady’s permission, I’ll certainly be back in the morning to apply the lotion again,” Theus said hastily, frantically determined to cut off any discussion about him transferring from the kitchen to Citrice’s control. He looked beseechingly at Letta for confirmation.
“If your ladyship wants him here in the mornings, we’ll assign him to come see you,” she immediately agreed.
“Very well, but not too early. I need my beauty rest, after all,” Citrice answered. She waited for a moment, then continued. “That was a joke, of course.”
“My lady, you certainly won’t need any beauty sleep,” Letta immediately pandered to the woman.
“That’s better. I just wish your young protégé was so polite, but such is the way with youth!” Citrice exclaimed. So you’ll send him back here tomorrow morning, and we’ll all find out if his medical powers are as extraordinary as you told my household. Now be on your way, and let me continue my routine,” she sat up and waved them away with her hands.
The pair left the bedroom and walked through the small salon to the public sitting room in front, where the maid was waiting.
“We’ll see you again tomorrow, when we come back as her ladyship requested,” Letta said pointedly. “You’ll be able to provide us with entry in a suitable manner, I trust?”
“Yes, my lady,” the maid said sullenly. She held the door open for the pair to exit.
Theus and Letta walked down the elegant halls in silence, until they turned a corner and entered a less august portion of the palace. Letta turned suddenly on Theus, throwing her arm out in front of him to stop him, then virtually pinning him against the wall as she stared at him fiercely.
“What exactly happened in there between you and that half-naked lady?” she hissed the question in his face.
“Nothing my lady!” These protested loudly. “Well, hardly anything. Nothing bad. I didn’t do anything,” he spit out a stream of answers.
“Tell me,” Letta repeated.
“When I went in, I met her in her bath,” Theus began. “But nothing happened. And then we moved to her bedroom, but nothing happened. I applied the lotion to her feet, and she asked for you to join us.”
Letta studied him, then raised her hand and gently patted him on the cheek. “Such a good boy,” she said softly. “Let’s get back to the kitchen; I have four lunch services I have to make sure are carried out.”
“I’d like to have a chance to go by the hospice, if I may,” he requested. “To check on the burn patients.”
“Oh yes, certainly. Please do check on our fellows,” Letta softened. “I do hope that you bring them some relief.
“Lady Citrice – she will feel better, won’t she?” Letta asked, her face drawing closer to Theus’s, and showing the doubt that lingered.
“Yes, I’m sure she will,” Theus answered, suddenly worried once again that something might not be right about the treatment.
“Come along then,” Letta ignored the stares the pair had drawn from bypassers, and she began walking again.
“You go out this door, and turn left, and you’ll find the hospice in a few minutes,” Letta told Theus a few minutes later as they wove among the traffic in the palace corridor, and passed a doorway. “Now go, then return to the kitchen, and we’ll see what comes next. I’m sure we’ll find something for you to do this afternoon.”
Theus nodded farewell, then dropped off to the side, and slipped out the doorway. He found himself outside the palace, on the north side, with landmarks in view that he recognized. He could find his way to the hospice in the bright sunlight that drenched the ground just beyond the palace’s shadows. And in the sunlight, he felt a diminishment of the fearfulness that Lady Citrice had inspired in his psyche while he had been in the palace. He’d only need to go back to see her one more time, twice more at most. Then her gout would be cleared up, and his service to her would be over.
The hospice came into view as he rounded the corner of one of the turrets that erupted from the palace’s architecture unpredictably. Theus walked in, and was immediately stopped by the attendant at the front door who had ignored him on every previous visit over the past few days.
“What have you done?” the man asked. “You’ve got this place in an uproar! What have you done?” he repeated.
Theus felt his heart thump wildly, as he wondered what had gone wrong. He rushed past the man and cut to his left, entering the ground floor wing of the building where he had visited Weese for so many consecutive days.
He saw Weese sitting up. The badly burned man was instantly visible as soon as Theus entered the ward. He had several people standing around him, talking closely with him, but a gap between two of the conversationalists framed a clear view of Weese.
The man had a face composed of skin that was mottled. That was different. Previously, the skin on the face had been one vast swath of scar material, but now it appeared something was changing. Theus hurried towards the bed where the man sat, and nearly reached it before Weese happened to spot his arrival.
“Here’s the one who done it!” Weese exclaimed.
All heads turned to look at Theus.
“Who are you?” one of the women in the circle asked, as Theus elbowed his way in next to Weese, then bent low to look at his patient.
“How do you feel?” Theus asked. “How do these changes feel?” he added.
The skin on the man’s face was a patchwork of spots that were growing into pink, healthy skin, and other spots that remained scar tissue – and there were some parts of his face that were changing back to skin, but less slowly than others.
“I feel a tingle in my skin, all the time,” Weese answered.
“What did you do to him?” one of the women standing next to Theus asked.
“These are my nurses,” Weese said, motioning to the women on one side of the bed with Theus.
Theus looked at the women: one looked bored, one looked bewildered, and the one who had asked the question looked interested. Across the bed on the other side, Theus saw a trio of people who were apparently other patients, judging from the crutches and cadaverous appearances.
“Great lord, can you heal me as well?” a man on crutches asked.
“I’m just a slave in the kitchen,” Theus replied. “I do as my mistress wishes. But I can ask if I can return to help others.”
“Can a slave in the kitchen really be able to do this?” asked the nurse who stood next to him.
“I was only recently captured and made a slave,” Theus answered.
“Were you a doctor before?” the nurse asked.
“I learned a lot of remedies, but I wasn’t a doctor,” Theus answered. “We need to keep an eye on you for the next few days. The healing process should continue to improve.
“How is Ruune?” he asked the group generally.
“Have you treated him too? We haven’t been to that side to examine the patients,” answered the woman next to him.
“Let’s go take a look, shall we?” she asked.
They departed together from the crowd examining Weese, and crossed over to the ward of more desperate cases. There was no crowd around Ruune’s damaged body, but both the visitors stood and stared in silent astonishment at the changes occurring upon the surface of the ruined body.
“We used to think this poor man should have just been put out of his misery,” the nurse told Theus. “Who would have ever believed this was possible?”
They both stood in silence and looked down at the wrecked body in the bed. The scar tissue was metamorphizing just as Weese’s was, mottled patches at various location along a spectrum from newly healthy skin to scar tissue that remain intact and unchanged. Buds were growing on the sides of his head where his ears had burned off, and features on his face were beginning to re-emerge.
“Will his arm grow back?” the nurse gestured towards the shoulder and empty space where scar tissue was changing and the limb was absent.
“I don’t know,” Theus answered. “That’s so much more than any of the rest of this.”
“How fast will the healing progress?” the nurse wanted to know.
“I think that within a week they’ll receive all the healing this remedy can provide,” Theus guessed. “I’ll stop in every day to check on them.”
“We’ll look forward to seeing you every day. Will you heal others while you’re here?” the woman seemed hopeful.
“I’ll ask my mistress,” Theus repeated, “she’ll have to give me the time and the money to buy the ingredients for the treatments.”
“Our infirmary doesn’t have much of a budget, but if we can help pay to end some of the suffering of our patients, we would find a way,” the nurse answered.
“I’ll let you know,” Theus promised. He patted Ruune on the man’s shoulder, and he watched his patient respond with a wave of his healthy arm, the first time Torella’s betrothed had acted to acknowledge Theus’s presence or treatment. Pleased, Theus left the hospice and found his way back to the kitchen in time to be asked to help deliver the lunch meal to one of the palace’s banquet rooms.
“Push this cart,” Letta assigned Theus, “and follow everyone else.”
Theus spent hours that afternoon helping to transport plates and glasses to serve a large wedding party for the daughter of one of the King’s friends. When he got back to the kitchen he found Letta and asked about helping others at the hospice.
“You can spend time there, but no more of my budget,” she said. “You’ll have to find someone else who can pay for the goods. I can’t afford charity for the whole palace.”
Theus glumly nodded his head in acknowledgement. He understood Letta’s budgetary limits. But he suspected that the number and severity of the cases at the hospice was going to prove too expensive for the nurses to afford to buy his ingredients in more than a few cases.
That evening, as he walked home, he tried to imagine where he could find funds to help pay for the supplies he would need to buy in the markets to treat the other hospice patients.
After he returned to his room and lay down in his bed in the darkness, he thought about Coriae, and her family’s wealth. With the money they possessed, they could have provided all the supplies he needed to heal every patient in the hospice now, and for the next one hundred years.
There was a suddenly knocking on his door, very faint. Before he could answer, the latch clicked, and the door began to open, without revealing any light from a lantern or candle.
“Hello?” he called, sitting up, slightly alarmed.
“Theus?” Torella’s voice whispered in the dark, and he faintly saw her dark figure come gliding through the shadows of his room, then sit upon the edge of his bed.
“Did you go to the hospice, Theus? Did you see him?” she asked in a plaintive voice.
“He’s looking better,” Theus answered. “He is showing some improvement, but it’s going to be slow, and there’s no telling how far it can go – maybe just a little bit, maybe a little bit more,” he cautioned.
“What’s happening? What did you see?” she was hopeful, he could tell.
Theus paused and tried to balance what he would report.
“There is some growth around where his ears were, and his scars are starting to soften toward skin in some spots,” he tried to say the things that were most positive. “But there’s a very long way to go. I don’t think his arm will grow back.”
“What about his face? His lips? His nose and eyes?” Torella surprised Theus by lying down on the mattress beside him. “Will he have his face?”
Theus lay back, and put his arms around the small girl, wrapping her in a tender embrace.
“I hope so. He did raise his arm to wave at me today,” Theus decided to reveal the best news, but hoped he didn’t give false hope.
“He knew you were there? Should I go see him? Would it cheer him up to know that I visited?” she asked. “Would you go if it were you?”
“He would appreciate hearing you there with him,” Theus reluctantly spoke. He had only spent a handful of days with Torella, but as they lay together with intimate coziness, he thought of her as his own special friend, one he wasn’t sure he wanted to leave him to return to affection with the healing Ruune.
“I’ll go back to see both he and Weese tomorrow after my other chores. Would you like to go with me?” he decided he had to ask.
“If I’m not assigned to other duties, I’ll go with you,” she agreed.
“Mmmm, it’s so nice to just be here with you. I feel safe,” she said sleepily a minute later, after a silent interlude. “Is it wrong to just enjoy your company, while we talk about poor Ruune?” she asked softly.
“I hope not,” finding that the question closely mirrored his own thoughts about Coriae while his hands softly massaged the flesh of Torella’s back through the thin fabric of her gown. “We’re good people. We won’t do the wrong thing.”
“I’m glad you think so,” Torella responded, then she rose from the bed. “I better go back to my room,” she said, and then he heard the door latch lift again, and she was gone.
Chapter 9
In the morning, Theus and Torella carried the plates of breakfast to the armory, and learned that the officers were distracted by important orders that had been handed down to them the previous evening.
“We’re going to war next week! That’s a great thing, eh?” Theus’s opponent in the morning fencing match crowed as they stepped onto the practice mat. “The magician has his black arts prepared to assist us in defeating Steep Rise’s defenses when we invade.”
The contest on the mat began in earnest then, but the high spirits of the officer made him too reckless, and Theus soon scored the points needed for a victory. The fast match earned scorn for the officer, and a demand that Theus contest a second match, which he did, and which eventually resulted in a narrow victory for him after a close-fought match.
“At least Glashtin gave you a competitive match,” the officers said to Theus. “Shouldn’t you plan to pack up and come along on the invasion as one of us?” one of them laughed. “You’re every bit as good as us with a sword.”
Theus laughed and waved them off, then left with Torella.
“Why don’t you become an officer with them Theus?” the girl asked as the pair walked through the halls of the palace. “They could pull some strings with their friends for you. You know they like you.”
“They’re not going to do that for me; they’ve only known me less than a week,” he replied.
“I’ve only known you less than a week too, but I know what a good man you are!” she answered spiritedly. “I’d do it for you, if I was them.”
“Thank you, Tory,” Theus said affectionately, genuinely touched by her comments.
“Are we going to the hospice now?” the girl asked.
“No, I have to go shower, and then I need to go see High Lady Citrice. Would you like to be my guide to her quarters?” he asked. “It’s in the nobles’ wing of the palace.”
“And then we’d go to the hospice after that?” Torella asked again.
“And then we’ll go to the hospice,” Theus agreed.
Torella led him directly to their residence hall, and waited in Theus’s room while he showered on the floor above, then returned to rejoin her.
“We better hurry. You don’t want to keep the nobility waiting,” Torella commented as they left the North Hall.
“I don’t think this particular noble lady rises very early in the morning,” Theus replied cheerfully. “We might find her still asleep when we get there.”
“And what are you treating her for? What medicine is this?” Torella wanted to know, and so Theus explained most of the situation to his companion as they traveled to the far end of the palace.
When they arriv
ed at the door to the room, the same maid opened the door, and admitted then without delay.
“Her ladyship is awake and out of her bath. You may go into her bedroom to treat her. You may wait here,” the maid indicated one of the sofas in the small antechamber for Torella, as Theus put his hand on the door of the bedroom. He knocked lightly, then carefully pressed the door open, and cautiously stepped in.
“There’s my dear boy,” Lady Citrice was waiting for him, lying in her bed under the covers.
“You’ve been an absolute miracle worker! I’ll be able to dance at the ball the day after tomorrow after all!” she exclaimed.
“My foot feels so much better already! Would you like for me to throw off these covers so that you can see for your self?” she asked.
“If you could just stick the foot out, I can look at it,” Theus said hopefully.
He raised the covers at the foot of the bed helpfully, and watched the gouty foot emerge, while Citrice laughed at his discomfort. The foot looked much improved. The swelling and redness had dissipated by a considerable degree.
“I think it is much better,” he said cheerfully. “But I’ll put a second treatment on it today for you, just to make sure,” he offered. He looked over at the window sill to confirm that the jar of remaining treatment still sat in place.
“You are such a good boy!” the noblewoman said delightedly.
Theus stepped over to get the lotion, and when he came back, he found that both of Citrice’s feet were exposed. “You might as well massage the other foot,” she explained with an impish grin. “You do it so well!”
Theus laughed softly. “Yes, my lady,” he agreed as he uncorked the jar in his hand and took out some of the lotion, then began to work it into the foot that needed treatment.
“So what other activities do you have today, beside attending to my feet?” Citrice asked languidly after a minute of quiet.
The Deadly Magician (The Memory Stones Series Book 2) Page 14
