Alex Bledsoe - Dark Jenny

“Please, no. His charm is too overpowering.”

Kay laughed. “You got that right.”

“Besides, Agravaine’s not the kind to try something in broad daylight. He’s like a cockroach, he needs shadows to function. I noticed he wasn’t in the hall when Drake arrived.”

“You can be sure Marc noticed, too. All right, I’ll take you down to the infirmary. Come on.”

The infirmary consisted of one big room filled with cots, and a smaller room for examinations. In the glow from the windows Iris was even more breathtaking. Her black hair, deliciously tousled the previous evening, was now neatly parted and combed, and a touch of artificial color shone on her eyelids and lips. Her white coat was immaculate, and beneath it she wore a powder-blue gown. The calves revealed below the hem were certainly good medicine for me. She sat writing something on a jar’s label before she put it on a shelf. Then she turned, saw me, and smiled.

“Good morning, gentlemen,” she said as she stood. Then she spotted my hand and scowled. “Well, that tells me you didn’t follow doctor’s orders. What happened?”

“I used it to make a point. Emphatically.”

“I bet it hurt.”

“It sure got my attention.”

She smiled knowingly. It was only adorable. “You know what’s ironic? First thing this morning I saw a broken nose that had also gotten twice as bad overnight. Damnedest thing. Two self-increasing injuries in one day.”

“Something must be going around,” I agreed.

“Bob, take those manacles off. And step outside, will you?”

“I think I should stay-”

She gave him a significant look. “Bob.”

Kay sighed, unshackled me, and went back out into the hall. He closed the door, but left a small gap. “Close it all the way, Bob!” Iris called. He did.

She nodded toward the examination table. “Now hop up there, little boy. I should warn you, though, that if you’re going to keep playing so rough, I’ll have to speak to your father.”

I jumped onto the edge of the table. She lifted my hand and gingerly pushed my sleeve up my arm. When she ran her fingertips lightly over the bruise, I winced. She said, “That tough-guy veneer really is just skin-deep, isn’t it?”

“If that.”

“You can cry if you want to, I’ll never tell. Now wiggle your fingers.” I did so, and she pushed on a couple of them. “I think you did some real damage this time, soldier. You need a cast.”

As she poured fresh water into a basin and placed it on the table beside me, I said, “I noticed that the beds in the other room were all empty. How’s the girl Mary?”

“She left. Said she wanted nothing more to do with castles and knights.”

My professionalism managed to get my attention. “And you let her? She was a witness to a murder.”

She shrugged as she withdrew a roll of cloth and began cutting it into strips. “She wasn’t my prisoner.”

“Do you know where she went?”

“Back to whatever small town she was plucked from, I suppose. She’ll probably marry her childhood sweetheart and start squeezing out babies.”

I said nothing. Mary probably couldn’t tell us anything else, but then again, maybe I hadn’t asked the right questions. I wondered if Agravaine had gotten to her.

Iris said, “I heard King Marcus is here.”

“Yeah, he got in this morning. Gave me a royal command to come see you, in fact, when he saw my hand.”

She poured some white powder into the water, and it immediately turned cloudy. “That’s a relief. He’s a good man, and he’ll straighten out these metal-plated idiots before someone else gets seriously hurt.”

Since my career as a knight was aborted pretty early, I never had the luxury of fighting directly for king and country. Certainly I had never served under anyone who inspired the loyalty of Marcus Drake. My warrior years were spent as a mercenary, a sword-for-hire battling for anyone who paid me. I didn’t care who the enemy was, or why we were at war with them. During those years I killed lots of people with no more thought than I’d have swatting a fly.

And our medical facilities were nonexistent. If we got cut, we stitched each other, and if we got stabbed anywhere vital, we died. If we were too wounded to fight, we were dumped: no parades, no medal ceremonies, no bards singing of our deeds. Certainly no neat rows of beds in an airy, clean castle, or beautiful young doctors to bolster both our flesh and our spirits.

As Iris checked on the progress of the thickening liquid in the bowl, I said, “So Agravaine came to see you?”

She nodded. “He said he ran into a door going to pee in the middle of the night. I don’t think his nose will ever set right now.”

“That’s too bad.”

She smiled again. I could watch her do that all day. “Treating his injuries is always a pleasure. I look forward to his final one.”

“That’s a bit callous.”

“Doctors have to be callous. If we got emotionally involved with our patients, we’d go nuts.”

That wasn’t terribly different from the way a soldier had to think; it was one reason I was no longer a soldier. “So you never get involved with patients?”

“Never,” she said at once. She dipped one of the cloth strips in the bowl, then draped it over my knuckles. It was wet and heavy, and she immediately overlapped it with another. She pressed the dangling ends against my skin, and they stuck there. She began threading strips between my puffy fingers.

I tried not to react when it hurt, but I didn’t fool her. “Will my hand be better than his nose?”

She smiled. “Don’t worry, I’ve treated this kind of thing on the battlefield many times. You’ll be fine. And I know a neat trick.”

By now the cloth around my hand and wrist had begun to stiffen. She produced a sword hilt, the blade neatly removed, and pressed the grip into my injured palm. “Now hold this as tightly as you can while the bandages harden. That way the cast will set in the right shape. You won’t have as much wrist movement, but you also won’t drop it every time you parry a blow.”

I did as she instructed while she cleaned up the remaining cloth strips and leftover plaster. In a few minutes, she removed the hilt from my hand, and sure enough, the cast retained the shape of my grip.

“See?” She put the sword hilt back on its shelf. “You won’t win any swordsmanship awards, of course.”

“I wouldn’t on my best day.”

She handed me a black sling. “If the pain gets too much, use this to keep your hand above your heart. It might also remove the temptation to use it as a battering ram. But the more you can stand having it down, the faster it’ll heal.”

I put the sling in my pocket and hopped off the table. “Not bad. Where’d you learn to do that thing with the sword, anyway?”

“I apprenticed during the last years of King Marcus’s military campaigns, doing battlefield triage. If a soldier wasn’t dead, he needed to be able to return to the fight. I worked this out myself.”

“Was your teacher a moon priestess?”

Her eyes flashed with a surprising degree of anger. “No. Medicine is a science on Grand Bruan, not some superstitious hocus-pocus.”

In every other kingdom I’d visited, moon priestesses were respected as healers. “I’ve seen them do some pretty amazing things,” I said cautiously.

“Yeah, well, knowing you have to stop the bleeding is easy. Understanding where the blood comes from is a hell of a lot harder.”

“I’m not trying to pick a fight, you know.”

She took a deep breath, then sheepishly smiled. “Sorry. If your fingers get numb, come see me immediately. It means either your hand’s grown more swollen or the cast is too tight. Either way you could end up with gangrene.”