Royal Assassin - Страница 98

I stood in the center of the room and looked around me. It had been months since I’d been here. Childhood memories came crowding back into my head. Hours spent before that hearth, mending or oiling harness. I’d used to sleep on a mat before the fire. Nosy, the first dog I’d ever bonded to. Burrich had taken him away, to try to break me of using the Wit. I shook my head at the flood of conflicting emotions, and quickly left the room.

The next door I knocked on was Patience’s. Lacey opened it and, at the look on my face, demanded immediately, “What’s wrong?”

“Burrich’s come back. He’s up in my room. He’s badly hurt. I don’t have much in the way of healing herbs—”

“Did you send for the healer?”

I hesitated. “Burrich has always liked to do things his own way.”

“Indeed he has.” It was Patience, entering the sitting room. “What’s that madman done to himself now? Is Prince Verity all right?”

“The Prince and his guard were attacked. The Prince was not harmed and has continued to the Mountains. He sent back those who were injured, with two sound men as an escort. Burrich was the only one to survive and get home.”

“Was the journey back so difficult?” Patience asked. Lacey was already moving about the room, gathering herbs and roots and materials for bandaging.

“It was cold and treacherous. Little hospitality was offered them along the way. But the men died when they were ambushed by archers, just across the Buck border. Burrich’s horse carried him off into a river. They were swept downstream quite a ways; it was probably the only thing that saved him.”

“How is he hurt?” Now Patience was moving, too. She opened a little cupboard and began to take out prepared salves and tinctures.

“His leg. The same one. I don’t know exactly, I haven’t looked at it yet. But it won’t take his weight; he can’t walk by himself. And he has a fever.”

Patience took down a basket and began loading the medicines into it. “Well, what are you standing about for?” she snapped at me as I waited. “Go back to your room and see what you can do for him. We’ll be up in a moment with these.”

I spoke bluntly. “I don’t think he’ll let you help.”

“We’ll see,” Patience said calmly. “Now go see that there is hot water.”

The buckets of water I had asked for were outside my door. By the time the water in my kettle was boiling, people had begun to converge on my room. Cook sent up two trays of food, and warmed milk as well as hot tea. Patience arrived and began to set out her herbs on my clothing chest. She quickly sent Lacey to fetch a table for her, and two more chairs. Burrich slept on in my chair, deeply asleep despite occasional bouts of shivering.

With a familiarity that astounded me, Patience felt his forehead, then searched under the angle of his jaw for swelling. She crouched slightly to look into his sleeping face. “Burr?” she queried quietly. He did not even twitch. Very gently, she stroked his face. “You are so thin, so worn,” she grieved softly. She damped a cloth in warm water and gently wiped his face and hands as if he were a child. Then she swept a blanket off my bed and tucked it carefully about his shoulders. She caught me staring at her, and glared at me. “I need a basin of warmed water,” she snapped. As I went to fill one she crouched before him and calmly took out her silver shears and snipped up the side of the bandaging wrapping his leg. The stained wrappings did not look as if they had been changed since his dunk in the river. It went up past his knee. As Lacey took the basin of warmed water and knelt next to her, Patience opened the soiled bandaging as if it were a shell.

Burrich came awake with a groan, dropping his head forward onto his chest as his eyes opened. For a moment he was disoriented. He looked at me standing over him, and then at the two women crouched by his leg. “What?” was all he managed.

“This is a mess,” Patience told him. She rocked back on her heels and confronted him as if he’d tracked muck on a clean floor. “Why haven’t you at least kept it clean?”

Burrich glanced down at his leg. Old blood and river silt were caked together over the swollen fissure down his knee. He recoiled visibly from it. When he replied to Patience, his voice was low and harsh. “When Ruddy took me into the river, we lost everything. I had no clean bandaging, no food, nothing. I could have bared it and washed it, and then frozen it. Do you think that would have improved it?”

“Here is food,” I said abruptly. It seemed the only way to prevent their quarreling was to prevent them from talking to each other. I moved the small table laden with one of Cook’s trays over beside him. Patience stood to be out of his way. I poured him a mug of the warmed milk and put it into his hands. They began to shake slightly as he raised it to his mouth. I had not realized how hungry he was.

“Don’t gulp that!” Patience objected. Both Lacey and I shot her warning looks. But the food seemed to take Burrich’s attention completely. He set down the mug and took a warm roll that I had slathered butter onto. He ate most of it in the space of time it took me to refill his mug. It was odd to see him begin to shake once he had the food in his hands. I wondered how he had managed to hold himself together before that.

“What happened to your leg?” Lacey asked him gently. Then: “Brace yourself,” she warned him, and placed a warm, dripping cloth onto his knee. He gave a shudder and went paler, but refrained from making a sound. He drank some more milk.

“An arrow,” he said at last. “It was just damnably bad luck that it struck where it did. Right where that boar ripped me, so many years ago. And it lodged against the bone. Verity cut it out for me.” He leaned back suddenly in the chair, as if the memory sickened him. “Right on top of the old scar,” he said faintly. “And every time I bent my knee, it pulled open and bled some more.”

“You should have kept the leg still,” Patience observed sagely. All three of us stared at her. “Oh, I suppose you couldn’t, really,” she amended.

“Let’s take a look at it now,” Lacey suggested, and reached for the wet cloth.

Burrich fended her off with a gesture. “Leave it. I’ll see to it myself, after I’ve eaten.”

“After you’ve eaten, you’ll rest,” Patience informed him. “Lacey, please move aside.”

To my amazement, Burrich said nothing more. Lacey stepped back, out of the way, and Lady Patience knelt before the stablemaster. He watched her, a strange expression on his face, as she lifted the cloth away. She damped the corner of the cloth in clean water, wrung it out, and deftly sponged the wound. The warm wet cloth had loosened the crusted blood. Cleaned, it did not look as evil as it had at first. It was still a nasty injury, and the hardships that Burrich had endured would complicate its healing. The parted flesh gaped and proud flesh had formed where it should have closed. But everyone visibly relaxed as Patience cleaned it. There was redness, and swelling, and infection at one end. But there was no putrefaction, no darkening of the flesh around it. Patience studied it a moment. “What do you think?” she asked aloud, of no one in particular. “Devil’s-club root? Hot, mashed in a poultice? Do we have any, Lacey?”

“Some, my lady,” and Lacey turned to the basket they had brought and began to sort through it.

Burrich turned to me. “Are those pots from my room?”

At my nod, he nodded in return. “I thought so. That fat little brown one. Bring it here.”

He took it from my hands and lifted the stopper from its mouth. “This. I had some of this, when I set out from Buckkeep, but it was lost with the pack animals, during the first ambush.”

“What is it?” Patience asked. She came, devil’s-club root in hand, to gaze curiously.

“Chickweed and plantain leaves. Simmered in oil, then worked with beeswax into a salve.”

“That should work well,” she conceded. “After the root poultice.”

I braced myself for his argument, but he only nodded. He suddenly looked very tired. He leaned back and pulled the blanket more closely about himself. His eyes sagged shut.

There was a knock at my door. I went to answer it, and found Kettricken standing there, with Rosemary at her elbow. “One of my ladies told me there was a rumor Burrich had returned,” she began. Then she looked past me into the room. “It’s true, then. And he’s hurt? What of my lord, oh, what of Verity?” She went suddenly paler than I thought she could be.

“He’s fine,” I reassured her. “Come in.” I cursed myself for my thoughtlessness. I should have sent word to her immediately of Burrich’s return and of the tidings he carried. I should have known that otherwise she would not be told. As she entered, Patience and Lacey looked up from the devil’s-club root they were steaming to welcome her with quick curtsies and murmurs of greeting.

“What’s happened to him?” Kettricken demanded. And so I told her; reporting all that Burrich had told King Shrewd, for I thought she had as much right to word of her husband as Shrewd had to word of his son. She blanched again at mention of the attack on Verity, but kept silent until my telling was done. “Thank all our gods that he draws closer to my Mountains. There he will be safe, from men at least.” That said, she drew closer to where Patience and Lacey were preparing the root. It had been steamed soft enough to crush into a pliable mass, and they were letting it cool before applying it to the infection.