She didn’t speak harshly, but Zelen still winced. “I’m sorry. Are you all right?”
“Wha—yes. Or, relatively. Why—oh. No. Not because of me,” she said, clearly believing she explained the obvious. “You should be careful because there could be a demon.”
“When couldn’t there be?” Zelen muttered a few phrases, and the magical lights shimmered faintly into existence. Pure and clear, they painted Branwyn’s wounds in unforgiving detail. “Gods have mercy.”
Darkness had blurred lines and taken the depth from colors. In the light, her face and neck were a study in red and purple: deep bruises, patches of missing skin, and dried blood. Blood had matted her hair in places, too, near where Zelen had felt the swellings on her head.
“They already have granted as much as you’ll gain from them by invocation,” said Altien. “Where does one obtain water and basins in this household? And do you have an adequate supply of female clothing?”
“Shockingly,” Zelen said, retreating into the joke, “no. Water and basins are in the kitchen.”
“I’ll go for them.”
“Really,” said Branwyn. She spoke with the slurred single-mindedness that Zelen had seen in many patients and more drunks—that he’d probably displayed a time or two, as the latter—but more desperation than was usual, “it’s not unlikely. And I can’t be of any assistance. I used my knives, and I’ve”—Zelen saw her eyes shine with more than the haze of the drug—“I’ve mislaid Yathana, and if I’ve failed so badly as to leave the demon alive—”
“Hush,” he said and, forgetting the last few days, took her hand. “If you went after a demon and took on all of this”—he gestured to the length of her body, with its broken skin and shattered knee—“as a result, that’s not failure.”
“It’s not success,” she said grimly.
“It’s a bloody lot more than most could’ve done.” Very gently, painfully aware of the places he shouldn’t even graze, he pushed a lock of hair back from Branwyn’s forehead. “I know injuries, mmm? Yours weren’t from a single blow. Whatever you fought, I’d lay odds it’s not feeling in peak condition just now itself.”
“Might still come after you, peak condition or not. ’M in your house.”
“And I’m not a Sentinel, but I’m not helpless. I’d be insulted that you thought so, except that I’ve drugged you.”
“Against ademon—”
Branwyn wasn’t exactly wrong. The small demons at the ball had been bad enough. The notion of a larger one out there, shambling its way toward him… Zelen grimaced but didn’t turn away from Branwyn. “There are a few things around here that’ll be better than steel, and some magical defenses as well,” he said. There were chests in the cellars. Winter hadn’t hit Heliodar as hard as other lands, but it, and the monsters that had come with it, had demanded a response. The great houses preserved their artifacts well. “Tomorrow, I’ll go to the temples and the mages for more… Don’t worry,” he added, seeing her stifle an objection. “After the ball, I shouldn’t wonder if they’ve got half the city asking for extra protection.”
Wire-tight muscles eased in Branwyn’s neck and shoulders. Zelen stroked her hair again and inwardly cursed all that kept him from doing more—the uncertainty of their situation as well as her injuries. As if reading his thoughts, she said, “I wouldn’ trust me too extens’vely, either, were I you.”
It wasn’t a quip, and Branwyn wasn’t seeking reassurance. Both of those were clear. She spoke bleak truth in a slurred, cracked voice, closing herself around the pain to do what was useful.
And itwastruth she spoke. If she’d been possessed, she could be again. Spells didn’t necessarily only work once. Madness, or conditioning, was unpredictable. Zelen couldn’t say he should trust her or even that he did.
He’d done so not that long ago. When they’d been fighting the demons, he’d put his faith in her as unquestioningly as he’d done in Altien when a particularly complex bit of healing or a large and thrashing patient—or a possible murderer in an alleyway—required two of them. He’d never thought to doubt. It had been a brief feeling, but its absence hurt all the same. Worse, it meant that he could offer no reassurance.
“You deserve better than all this,” he said.
* * *
Gentleness called forth the tears that Branwyn had been too overwhelmed to shed from pain. Her body still lacked too much water for them to do more but prickle at the back of her eyes, but they were there. Zelen had known her for all of two weeks, knew that she could’ve killed two people brutally, and still his hand around hers and his fingers in her hair were the gentlest touch she’d known since she’d become a Sentinel and a weapon.
She swallowed and welcomed the pain. It centered her.
Did she deserve better? The Rognozis aside, she’d killed people, gotten others killed, and chosen her path. She hadn’t had very many choices, but who did? The farmer’s child and the wheelwright’s apprentice didn’t exactly make mindful choices about their future. Neither had Zelen, gentle and deft and barred from his calling for stupid reasons of status.
Hazy, slurred, she formed words. “Ever’one deserves better than all this.” She gestured to indicate the world. It hurt, though not as badly as it would have a half hour earlier. “It’s…” A quotation drifted up through rapidly thickening layers of mist, a passage from a book she’d read on some road. “‘A web’s pretty ’nless you’re a fly.’”
“And she quotes Cosnian while drugged,” Zelen remarked. At first, Branwyn thought he was talking to her and pretending to have an audience.
No, his friend was there, setting down large basins of hot water and thick, folded towels. She remembered bathing as a thing normal people did and liked the idea, then looked at Zelen and quickly away. They’d almost been lovers. Now, given what she might have done…
“My name is Altien,” said the third person in the room, “and with your permission, I’ll assist you in bathing while Zelen acquires clothing. I know that a female attendant is usual, and I’m male, but I promise you that while I’m sure you’re comely by the standards of your people, I don’t have such exotic tastes.”
Branwyn blinked, then giggled, from the formality and the drugs but also from relief. “Yes,” she said, “an’, Zelen, get weapons. Wards.”
He gently set her hand down and rose. “Quite so. I’ll be back soon—can’t imagine the family’s left any very lethal guardians in the cellars.”
