"I... wish... you--" Korr tried to say. His whisper was so faint I had to lean close to hear it.
"Yes, yes, that I wouldn't do this," I said. "Too bad. We've got to get these things out of you. I wonder if you recovered as much as you did because you're as strong as you are. And when I left--"
And when I'd left, I'd caused him to start withering, and the infection had gained a foothold. I stroked his cheek with my other hand. Something about that sounded right, but it was all fragmented, like I was looking at reflections in broken pieces of glass. I shook my head once, but it didn't clear.
"It's not... your... fault."
"I'm doing this because I am your consort and I love you."
Ormiss returned with a thick cord used to tie back curtains, a small silver bowl, and one of the kitchen knives meant to cut through bone. Korr tracked the movement with his eyes, but otherwise did not move. His misery was something I could almost taste on my tongue, along with how exhausted he was, and maybe under that, fear.
It'd been a tough few days.
Ormiss, reluctantly, offered Asund the knife handle first. An unspoken look of don't fuck this up passed between them. Ormiss used one of the ribbons hanging behind the door (Korr had an assortment, apparently) to tie back his hair in a tight, severe braid and quickly knotted it at the base of his skull. Itek scooped back his hair with another ribbon.
"Very... dandy..." Korr said.
I did not tell Korr that he looked tragically beautiful like this. He probably already knew. He was the only person I'd ever met who could be poetically sick.
"Ready?" Itek asked me.
"I'm not," Asund muttered.
"Yes," I said. "Where should we cut me?"
Asund grimaced. "Outer thigh."
I shimmied to the edge of the bed. It was a bit awkward arranging my leg--Itek held it bent--so that the blood would run into the bowl slightly under it. Asund ran his fingers down the outside of my leg, studying it like a surgeon, then he counted under his breath, and made a deft, quick, curved slice a hand's length above my knee joint.
The pain made me hiss. It stung. Then it burned. My flesh pulled apart and blood instantly welled up out of the wound.
Ormiss blanched and looked away.
"Don't you dare faint," I told Itek as the blood fell into the bowl in a thin stream.
Asund had to put the knife down.
"And don't you dare throw up," I told the wolf as he went almost as gray as Korr.
"Tell me that's going to stop bleeding," Ormiss said, his back still turned.
Ormiss had turned Asund's back into ribbons and he couldn't handle me bleeding from a little cut?
"It looks worse than it is," Asund said, sounding strangled.
It sure stung like hell. Damn.
"That's enough," Itek said once there was a small puddle in the bowl. I didn't ask him what he thought enough was, but the trickle had slowed to a good-paced dripping. Itek made off with the bowl while Asund clamped a bandage over my leg and leaned onto it.
"Ow!" I tried to push him away.
"Need to stop the bleeding."
I caressed his cheek as he leaned on my leg with both hands. "I'm fine, Asund. It's not bad."
Ormiss' skirts swished as he turned back around. He nudged Asund. "I'll do that. We need to get started."
Asund wrapped the curtain cord around his broad palms. Korr gave him a one-eyed wintery look.
"You're thinking of saying something perverse, aren't you," Asund said wrly.
A blink to indicate yes.
"Let me guess. You've played with rope before."
Korr's lips compressed into a smile clearly meant to hold in snickers his body couldn't afford.
"How do you play with rope?" I asked with a sigh.
All of them looked at me.
"What?" I asked. "It was just a question?"
Asund leaned over Korr. "This isn't your preferred game, right?"
Korr blinked, and it somehow came off as no.
"Good, because I'm not interested in mixing this game with what we're about to do."
Korr rasped, "Same."
Asund dropped to one knee next to Korr's shoulder and slipped the rope between Korr's jaw. "You know how this works then, dragon."
I held the little container for the thorns (spikes, needles, whatever they were) in one hand, and slipped my other into Korr's. He entwined his graceful, fragile-feeling fingers around mine. Something told me he was afraid.
I squeezed his hand gently.
Itek lifted the bowl of blood, tilted it, and poured a thin trickle of my thickening blood around the perimeter of the pocket. Korr's breathing sped up. Itek's eyes shifted back to a raptor's. The blood slowly oozed down into the pocket. Itek poured another round, and then another. Then he smoothed one hand through the remains in the bottom and wrung his hands together to coat his hands completely.
"They're shifting," he reported. "The blood is weakening them."
He picked up the tweezers.
Korr screamed as Itek fished out another thorn. Ormiss pinned his legs, although Korr was too weak to thrash too much. Even his grip on my hand was weak, and his fingers jerked instead of clenching. Itek deposited the thorn into the container I held, then fished out another one, and another, and another, and another.
"Stop a minute," I said after the fifth. Korr's grip on my hand was completely gone, and his eyes had rolled back into his head. Itek stopped, and Asund pulled back the cord. Korr collapsed, every bit of strength he had left going to breathing. His heart beat so hard his gray skin showed every vein and throbbing artery, and there was no chill left, only a smoldering heat like sun-warmed rocks melting snow.
I leaned over him, kissed his forehead, tried somehow to will something into him with my touch like Eaon had told me I could do, but it was probably useless.
"I wonder if they're fighting back," I said. Like they were releasing a toxin on the way out, or were barbed in reverse to tear at his skin as they were removed.
Asund and Ormiss gave me quizzical why would you think that looks. But Itek was already focused on ordering Asund to cut me again, and then pouring more blood into the pocket, and smoothing the blood on the sooty stains radiating out from the pocket.The second round of extractions seemed easier for Korr to bear, thank whatever gods were watching, because I doubted he could have survived another dozen like the first dozen.
The needles kept dropping into the container.
"You fucked with the wrong porcupine, dragon," Ormiss told Korr as Asund cut me for the third time.
Korr, somehow, still had the strength and presence of mind to half-smile, even though he clung to awareness by a thread.
"This is the last cut," Asund told Itek. "She's getting woozy."
"I'm fine," I said, although I was a little light-headed.
"We won't need more," Itek said. "I'm almost done. And this is receeding. See?"
He gestured with a blood-caked hand the dried blood he had smeared over Korr's side. The perimeter of the blood had met the edge of the sooting, but now the sooting had clearly started to fall back towards the pocket.
I swayed with relief.
Ormiss caught me with one arm, and took the cup of needles from me with the other.
Itek made quick work of the remaining needles, although it was hard to tell if Korr was screaming and his throat was just too raw to actually scream, or if it wasn't as painful. But at least it was fast, and Itek examined the pocket very carefully to make sure he'd gotten them all. Asund pulled the rope from Korr's mouth, brushed his hand over Korr's sweat-soaked hair. "We'll look after her. You rest."
Korr's eyelashes fluttered, but all the fight seemed to flee his body, and the thread holding him in this world snapped.
I bit my lip.
Ormiss made off the the nightmarish container of needles, while Itek went to go wash his hands. Asund offered me his hand. "Be careful standing."
The woozy hit me as I stood, along with wicked sharp pain in the three curved cuts on my outside thigh. Blood trickled down my leg. Asund steadied me.
I looked back at Korr. The pale bed clothes were stained with blood splatters, and he looked like a dirty, old snow melting on hot stones. But the sooty halo was receeding. In the layer of dried blood, Itek had used his fingernail to carve a circle, and the soot had retreated even further.
Maybe... maybe it was working.
The wings beat on my woozy brain, and my brain shifted and flashed like broken glass.
Was my memory coming back? I... knew... this. Just like I knew all about snow.
Itek came back with clean hands, and wordlessly gestured for Asund to carry me into his room across the hall.
I'd never been in Itek's room, which was decorated in vermillion reds and sandy golds, and instead of a bed, he had a circular arrangement of thirty or forty pillows on a raised platform in the center of the room, affording him a bit of a view from the large windows overlooking Haven. But Asund took me into the washroom off to the left, and he and Itek quietly doctored the cuts on my thigh.
"Nope, no falling over," Itek said as I dozed off.
Suddenly, I was so tired. So, so, so exhausted. Like my bones were thinner sort of tired. Asund caught me before I fell back into the tub and cracked my skull.
Ormiss arrived, and seemed much more... lightening-y... than usual. Everything about him seemed to crackle and make my skin prickle like just before a thunderstorm cracked open. My being protested having to spend the energy to feel the sensation.
Ormiss stepped over the tub's edge and pressed his finger to my lips. It was too much work to keep my mouth closed. His finger grazed my tongue with something sweet and thick.
Honey.
Fetid honey from ruined flowers...
My being reacted with revulsion as my body welcomed the honey, and all my seams pulled and shifted while the broken window panes bashed my brain like wings. My scars throbbed with the dull beat of my heart.
"I know," Ormiss crooned, "I know. More."
The honey was sunlight through dust, tasted of despair. I fought. He didn't let me, and smeared more on my gums and under my tongue.
If Asund or Itek questioned what he was doing, I didn't hear them. I flopped over trying to escape... something... and succeeded only in being cradled in Asund's grip.
Limp and dangling, someone carried me somewhere, and set me down on a bed.
Korr.
Someone arranged my hand over Korr's abdomen. I didn't care. I was so exhausted I ceased to care about anything at all.
/*******
Peeps:
Apparently, this is part 100. MILESTONE.
Will we do 100 more?
I wouldn't be surprised. This is the story that never ends, apparently...
~ Merry
(productive pantster pantstering)
*******/