Alex Bledsoe - Dark Jenny

Agravaine laughed. In the small, dim room it sounded especially malicious. “Sure, if a whore needs it, I’ll knock some sense into her. Got to keep them in their place. Right, fellas?”

The two men chuckled in agreement.

The girl squeezed out fresh tears at Agravaine’s description of her. “I’m not a whore,” she whispered, so quietly only I heard it.

“Excuse me a moment,” I said softly, and turned. Somewhere in that simple motion, I made a fist and swung it with all my weight and strength into Agravaine’s round, smug face.

I hit him harder than I’d ever hit anything in my life. The weight of the manacle added that little extra grace note, and the chain slapped me in the cheek. Bones snapped, some in my hand, most in his nose, and he dropped like a bag of wet mud.

He sat up almost at once and clutched his nose as blood oozed between his fingers. “Som ub a bid!” he cried, his voice distorted.

His two pals drew their swords. The distinctive shting was especially loud in the small room, and the blades took up an awful lot of space.

“Cador! Hoel!” Kay yelled, and stepped in front of me. “Scabbard those swords now!”

For a moment everyone was silent and still. Then the two sidekicks put their weapons away.

“He broke my nose,” Agravaine said as he stood. It came out as He brode my node. He pulled his hand away from his face and looked at the blood. “Hold him for me, boys. Oh, you are about to get such an ass-kicking.”

The tip of Kay’s sword touched the hollow in Agravaine’s throat, then lifted his chin. He’d drawn it so fast and silently none of us noticed. “You’re not doing anything, soldier. All three of you are on report. Get back out there, and if I see any sign of you anywhere else before we leave, I’ll personally demote each of you back to assistant squire.” Kay glared particularly at Agravaine. “And I promise you, that’s a lot less than Marc would do if he were here.”

Agravaine pointed a bloody finger at me. “Me and you, asshole. Soon.” Then he looked at the girl, who curled up even tighter under his glare. “And you? Remember what I said.”

Then they left, slamming the door behind them.

Kay turned to me. “That was smart,” he muttered as he sheathed his sword. He opened the door and yelled, “Morholt! Find a doctor and send him over here. Now!”

He closed the door, then turned to the girl. His whole demeanor softened, and he spoke with a kindness that surprised me. “Miss? What’s your name?”

“Mary,” she said in a tiny voice.

“Mary, I’m Bob Kay, and this is Mr. LaCrosse. We’re truly sorry those men hurt you. They did not have orders to do so and they will be punished for it. I know they probably threatened you as well, but I promise you they won’t be in any shape to hurt anyone when I get done with them. You saw they were scared of me.”

She made a low, whimpering sound that eventually became the words “All I said was that the queen gave me the apples. I never said she poisoned them. I swear, I’m a good citizen, I love Grand Bruan.”

I found a basin with some water in it, dipped a napkin, and reached to wipe some of the blood from her face. She winced and drew back from my hand; I abandoned the idea. Instead I asked, “Mary, did Queen Jennifer give you the apples personally?”

She nodded slightly.

“Did you notice if they smelled funny?”

She shook her head. “We were in the kitchen; there was so much cooking, I couldn’t smell anything.”

“Did she arrange to give them to you before the banquet?” I pressed, as gently as possible.

“No. She brought them down to the kitchen, and I just happened to be the one picked to carry them. She said… she said I looked the prettiest.”

She began to sob, and I glared over the top of her head at Kay. “That guy owes me more than a broken nose to settle this.”

“Not while you’re toting that hand,” Kay said.

I looked and saw that the knuckles were already red and swollen. I’d been so angry I hadn’t really registered the damage. When I tried to flex my fingers, pain shot up my forearm.

“Uh-huh,” Kay said wryly. “A sword jockey with no sword hand; choice.”

Someone knocked softly at the door. “It’s Dr. Gladstone,” a woman’s voice said, and she entered without waiting for an invitation. She closed the door behind her, looked around, and said, “I can’t work with romantic mood lighting. Turn up that lamp, will you?”

Kay adjusted the wick, the room grew brighter, and I got my first look at Iris Gladstone. She was about thirty, clad in a distinctive white coat and toting the little black satchel of her profession. Everything about her spoke of strength and elegance, from her short black hair to eyes so big and blue it was like looking into the sea itself. She seemed somehow too glamorous for such a down-and-dirty job as physician. Or maybe because she was such a knockout, I couldn’t imagine her tending bloody injuries.

“That’s better,” she said as the lamp stopped flickering. “So I was told there’d been an accident in the kitchen,” she said in a deep, take-charge voice. “Somebody slice open a finger?”

“Ah… no,” Kay said, and stepped aside to reveal the girl.

The doctor’s face darkened when she saw the injuries. Her hands quickly danced around the bruised eye and cut lip, brushing back the hair to check for other marks. She murmured soothingly to Mary, then turned and glared at us with the kind of fury only the morally righteous can have. “And which one of you chivalrous sons of bitches did this?” She glanced at my manacles. “You?”

“You’ll probably get a visit later from a knight with a broken nose,” I said. “His fist matches up with those bruises.”

She stared at me for a moment as the words got through her fury. Then she noticed how I cradled my hand, and the tiniest smile I’d ever seen moved across her moist, voluptuous lips. “So does your fist match his broken nose?”

I shrugged. “I swatted a fly.”

A flicker of appreciation, but no more than that, touched her face. Then the hard look clamped down again. “Amazing how often you armor-clad assholes manage to hurt the people you’re supposed to defend, especially if they’ve got breasts.” She opened her black bag and brought out a small jar of ointment. “Now, will one of you boys be genuinely useful and light a couple more lamps? I’d like to see what I’m doing.”

I took down a pair from a shelf with my good hand. Kay took them from me, arranged them for best effect, and lit them. Gladstone ignored us, but that was okay. It gave me the chance to watch her slender form as she worked, attending to the wounds with efficient gentleness. She produced vials and powders from her bag and applied them sparsely, but with a feather-light touch. Mary obeyed the doctor’s entreaties, and within moments she’d stopped crying and started to lose the red flush of panic.

“Will she be all right?” I asked softly, not wanting to startle the girl.

The doctor looked up and our eyes met. It was no more than an instant, but it was enough. Sometimes you meet someone and just know, instantly and without a doubt, that you’re destined to cross all the boundaries that separate you. The process defies logic and common sense, but everyone’s experienced it at least once. At that point in my life, it had happened twice before, and both those women were dead. It scared the hell out of me to feel it again for this no-nonsense doctor, and I was actually glad I had a murder to solve to help keep my mind off it.

“Yes,” the doctor said. “Eventually.”

“May I ask her one last question?” I said.

“Not on my watch,” Dr. Gladstone snapped as she applied a bandage over the girl’s split cheek.