“So, let’s say I take your advice…”
Highlark snorted.
“… whencanI move around?”
He studied her with narrowed, lavender eyes.
“I hesitate to make the suggestion,” he said, “because it will be very annoying if you misbehave and I have to saw your leg off.”
Viv swallowed.
“But.” He rummaged in his bag. “Callis oil. I normally wouldn’t use this. You’ve heard of it?”
She shook her head and watched as he removed the lid from a small earthenware pot containing a yellow cream. It smelled like pond scum by way of raw lye.
“It was once used on battlefields where the side effects wereworth enduring, given the dire circumstances. The sensation it produces is… well. It’s been compared to hornet stings.”
Viv almost laughed. “That’s not so bad.”
“Continuous hornet stings at every point of application, for hours and hours and hours,” Highlark elaborated.
“Oh.”
“However, its healing properties are unrivaled, especially when it comes to stitching together rent flesh on the quick. Were we to apply it today, then by tomorrow morning, I might approve oflimitedmobility. As long as the bindings are left undisturbed, and you make use of that crutch.”
“Ihavebeen.”
“Then I take it you’d like to give it a go?”
Viv glanced around the tiny room, at her leg, and at the crutch. She nodded. “Do it.”
When he first slathered the callis oil on with a small wooden spade, the sensation was cold, and she thought he’d been blowing smoke. Or that orcs might be immune to the effect.
Then the burn began to set in.
Then it was a forest fire of needles.
Then she would’ve traded it for being stabbed all over again.
She decided it was a good thing she could still see the bruises on Highlark’s neck while he rewound her bandages, because it kept her from throttling him a second time.
She skipped lunch and dinner. Indeed, she didn’t rise from the straw-tick mattress again that day. Food was as far from her mind as Rackam and his Ravens were from this gods-forsaken place. The pain was incandescent, all-consuming, and Viv layon her back, breathing long, shuddering breaths while sweat slicked every inch of her.
Pain tolerance was a point of personal pride, and for the first thirty minutes, she’d been positive that she’d be able to master the flayed feeling in her thigh. That it would dull into a throb. But the edge stayed sharp, unblunted by passing minutes or by careful breathing. Perversely, it honed itself ever sharper.
In the face of that, she clutched for the story she’d just read. It was slippery, like muck-slick rope running through her fingers. She caught a good grip on it only intermittently, but flashes of Madger and Legann, of rooftop swordfights and nighttime flights astride huge black horses, kept her eyes on an interior vista.
In the darker hours, she didn’t even manage a doze. Not really. Not well. There were simply snatches of time where her thoughts were on the insides of her eyelids.
Before the pink of predawn, the storm blew itself out at the same time as the fire in her leg, and the straining muscles of her body collapsed into a tremorous unconsciousness.
She slept hard. She slept late. And when she woke, she wanted to eat the whole world.
5
Viv paused before crutching her way down the front steps of The Perch. In the wake of the storm, the sky burned hot and blue, and the beach grass seemed to have flushed from yellow to green overnight. The sand was pitted and dimpled, as though a million tiny creatures had traversed it in the dark.
Her leg wasn’t miraculously mobile, but the fleshdidfeel less tender, more solid. When she tested it through the bandages with her fingers, it seemed to take more pressure to set off a nauseous ache. The feverish memory of the callis oil’s burn wasn’t one she’d soon forget, though.
