Lies Dressed In Lace

Secretly Not Keeping Secrets

"How could I not see you bringing that boy to our place? How could I not see you going back to that witch, to think I was hopping you were there to see me after all these years?" He hops off the window and tosses a jar of some salve at me, I catch it easily.

"What is this?" I ask ignoring his moment of vulnerability he only seems to show around me and expects to be ignored.

"Its whats going to save your sisters fallen knight, it's not just a wound, the knife was poisoned." I hold it up looking at it closer at the pink, shiny, gooey substance.

"What kind of poison?" He shrugs the large tattoo of some kind of armor on his arm and shoulder stretches with the skin exposed from his simple leather vest across his chest.

"You don't need to know, but don't give it to anyone else, once its done its purpose hide it or get rid of it, playing god won't make death favor you."

"This will save him though?" I ask and he nods stepping closer to me.

"And you don't even have to be raped by a monster for it." I clinch my jaw against the pain that sentence causes, that he knows it causes.

"What do you want for it then?" I snap because I know he wants something, he always does.

"A kiss." The one thing the witch didn't take from me.

"You said I wouldn't have to be raped by a monster for this." He laughs.

"A kiss is not rape my love, especially if you've already given me one." And I thought he would never hurt me, how foolish. He leans down and I go up onto my toes till our lips are a hairs breath apart, I look into his green eyes that I knew so well once upon a time and whisper.

"Then your memory is payment enough." I pull away and disappear out my door deciding to go to Charlie with the salve, I know he wont leave me alone now but I cant kiss him again, not as payment for a life I will never have.

I get back to Charlie's room and find Ann taking a nap so instead of waking her I go and find the healer, I need help taking his bandages off and who better but the person that put them on. Lynn is sitting with another knight who's lying in a cot with bandages wrapped around his torso and arms, blood seeps through the thin white cloth. Lynn is writing the things that he says down onto a piece of paper and Valtok is standing over her shoulder, both are listening intently to the injured man, "He was huge, and covered in scars. They came out of no where and attacked so savagely we didn't see it coming I'm lucky to be alive and-" They all look at me when I clear my throat.

"What are you doing here princess?" Lynn asks standing and hiding her parchment from me behind her back. If its that big of a secret maybe I shouldn't have interrupted.

"I was hoping to speak to you alone, is it a bad time?" I ask and she shakes her head and excuses herself to the men with a bow then leads me out into another empty room.

"What is it dear?"

"I have reason to believe that Charlie wasn't just stabbed he was poisoned, and this might be the antidote, I feel we have no time to test it so I would like to put this on his wound as soon as possible." She nods taking the jar I have outstretched to her and we walk back to Charlie's room where Annika is still sleeping soundly. The healer and I work quickly and quietly to clean the bandage and other liquid off then she takes a scoop of the salve and smooths it over the angry red wound that hasn't healed at all. As soon as the salve touches the skin it becomes noticeably less irritated. How did he know?

"That explains quite a bit, but not how you came into possession of this knowledge or the salve." She says asking me where I got it in not so many words. I take the little jar back.