Dread Isle, Outside the Rose
He looked around the dark waters, and said Hulali would protect him. Niccolette made a little face, glancing away. He did not protect Uzoji, she wanted to say, sharp and bitter. Nor did Hurte, and She should have loved him for his beauty. Her hand gripped the fabric of her skirt, tightly; the other squeezed the flask. Niccolette breathed in, deep, and exhaled out as well.
“As you like,” The Bastian said with a little shrug. There was more than calm in her voice; there was something there, some nameless ache, beneath the easy words. She did not acknowledge it. She knelt on the damp wood next to the Mugrobi, gaze flicking professionally over his bare torso. She made a little face at the sight of the wound in his side; grime-smeared fingers hovered, close. She did not touch it directly, but guided her sight with them.
Sluggish bleeding, at least; it was the sort of cut which needed a deep washing and pressure, but not stitches, not if the bleeding was already slowing. Niccolette turned her attention back to Demkaih’s shoulder. She could feel the weight of so many casts bearing down on her, aching through her bones; she did not dare risk a quantitative cast to diagnose him.
“Hold this,” Niccolette gave the flask back to Demkaih. “Do not drink the rest just yet,” she told him, a little sharply. With both hands, carefully, she pressed against the skin around the bullet hole. She was not gentle; gentleness served no purpose. She searched with her fingertips against the hard muscle and the bones, gaze distant, feeling for anything out of place, any hint that a bullet remained.
Niccolette exhaled when she was done, crouched next to Demkaih still. She took the flask from him again. “Lean back,” Niccolette said, unscrewing the top. Merciless, she poured the gin through the wound, her face set and expressionless through any cries of pain. It did not bother her; she could not let it bother her. She let him enough for another drink, pressing the open flask back into his hand.
The Bastian breathed in deep, and exhaled once more. She found the rhythm of her breath, kneeling next to the Mugrobi, her head bowed. She chanted, quietly; it was not a spell that she cast, not at first, but words of affirmation and connection, reaching out to the mona and pledging herself to them, again and again. She spoke them into the cold night air; she offered them up and herself too, all that she was; all that she had left to give, she gave, and freely, unrepentant.
The words faded in time, but she kept the rhythm of her breath. Flames glittered distant over the dark water; they flickered in time with her, and Niccolette knew them.
Slowly, she began to cast. A spell to knit together torn flesh was one of the first things any healer learned; muscle was harder, with all its tendons and veins. One needed to explain to the mona in detail how the shoulder should be, and guide them, verbally, through the process of making it whole. But Niccolette knew many spells for such purposes, and Demkaih was not the first she had sewn back together with the mona.
It hurt, as she had promised. The pain of her palpitations, the pain of the washing out of the wound with gin – it was nothing compared to the cast. Niccolette went on, merciless and unyielding; hazy energy streamed from her and wound into Demkaih’s shoulder, sinking into the wound, filling it with each word she spoke. The pain, too, filled it and him; he would feel it through every inch of the wound, a crawling, prickling, stabbing sensation, as if Niccolette had reached inside him and driven a thousand tiny needles into his skin. It was the feeling of her dragging him to healing, of her demanding to the mona that his shoulder be made whole; she did not temper it with kindness. There was no strength left for that, not in her.
Blood trickled, slowly, from her nostril. Niccolette cast through it, steadily, unperturbed, and through the taste of it as it dripped onto her lips. Whatever lip color she had worn was gone, but her blood smeared bright red over her lips as they moved. She did not so much as react; she did not so much as reach up to wipe it away. She only kept going, and let the bright red gleam on her face in the distant firelight.
Finally, Niccolette curled the spell; finally, the pain would begin to ease. Demkaih’s shoulder was whole, once more, on both sides; sore, still, tender and painful, with circlular scars to show where the bullet had gone – the muscle beneath was not fully healed, but he might have been shot weeks ago, rather than minutes.
Niccolette sat back, a little hard. She wobbled; she fished a handkerchief from her dress, slowly, and bent her head forward, a dark curtain of messy hair tumbling between them as she pressed the handkerchief to her nose, pinching the bridge of it with her fingers. In a few moments, the blood flow slowed; Niccolette wiped her nose and balled up the handkerchief, tossing it into the dark water below.
“We have half an hour before my boat returns,” Niccolette said, quietly. She lifted her chin, looking up at the glittering stars, and combed her hair back off her forehead; she turned, slowly, her gaze going to the slumped-but-breathing figure Demkaih had left on the beach. “I think it enough time to deal with the last of our pests.”