Erik clears his throat. “As flattering as this is, please don’t kill yourselves because I walked in here without a shirt on. Miss Tessa, I do think the poultice needs changing.”
That steals any heat from my cheeks, and I look back at him. The bandage is stained, like his wound seeped during the night. The skin surrounding the bandage has reddened. My earlier concern returns.
Olive bumps my shoulder. “Go see to your not-husband,” she murmurs, and I realizehercheeks are still pink. “I’ll make lunch.”
“He’s not my anything!” I whisper back. “He calls me Miss Tessa!”
“Oh, I thought that was a Kandalan thing. I found it endearing.”
Erik says, “You two know I can hear you, right?”
I heave a sigh. “I’ll get my supplies.” I cut a glance at Erik. “But he’s more like an annoying big brother than anything else.”
While she cooks, I have Erik sit in one of the chairs. When I pull the bandage free, he hisses, as it brings blood and a thin layer of pus with it. The surrounding skin is swollen and inflamed.
He must read my face before I can say anything. “Not good?”
I put a hand against his forehead. I thought his face was damp from shaving, but now that I’m sitting this close to him, I wonder if he’s sweating—but it’s also a warm day. “I’m worried it’s infected. Do you feel like you have a fever?”
“No.”
I give him a look, but he looks right back at me, adding flatly, “I can be more annoying about it if I need to be.”
“Look,” I say. “Olive thought you were myhusband.”
“I’m ten years older than you!” he exclaims.
The pan on the stove sizzles as Olive adds some buttered bread. “It’s notthatdramatic a difference. My father and mother werefifteenyears apart.”
I’m not really listening to them. I’m peering at his abdomen again. The stab wound isn’t healing well at all. Puncture wounds are always so tricky. I remember tracing Corrick’s scars in the lantern-lit darkness on the ship, hearing him tell me about the smugglers who’d attacked him. He had a stab wound similar to this, too.
I thought that one was going to do me in, he said.Took ages to heal.
“It’s bad, isn’t it?”
Erik’s voice calls me back, and I blink, then look up. He’s not teasing me anymore, and his eyes hold mine.
“It’s not great,” I say. “Spending half the day walking and then unloading a wagon probably didn’t help.” I chew at my lip, thinking of the way he was pulling dusty tarps off the rowboats, too. I’m better with elixirs and creams and poultices. Easing pain. Providing remedies for fevers and coughs. I don’t have much experience with long-term injuries like this, and I’m going to have to go back through my books to see what my father’s old notes say. I’mworried we might need to cut the infection away, but I don’t know if it’s gone that far yet.
“I can make another poultice, but if I can trust you to lie down for a while”—I fix him with a glare—“I think you should leave it to the air and let the infection dry out a bit. I’m worried it’s beginning to spread.”
“Do you have spirits?” Olive says, adding cheese to the bread. “Whiskey? Anything stronger? It might be better to cut out the infection and rinse it with that first.”
Erik stares at her. “And then what? Set myself on fire?”
Ellmo appears in the doorway, and he gasps, but not with horror. “Can I watch?”
Olive doesn’t turn away from the stove. “It’s what the surgeons had to do after the war.” She pauses. “There were a lot of wounds like that.”
Erik meets my eyes, and he looks like he’s expecting me to find her suggestion insane—but when I obviously don’t, he swallows.
“What do you think?” he says to me, his voice low.
“I think you’re on the edge of infection spreading, if it hasn’t already.” I hesitate. “I don’t know what kind of healers they have left here. You saw the citadel. If the infection spreads quickly, you could be dead in days.”
He runs a hand across his face and swears. “Well,damn, Miss Tessa.”
Ellmo lights up and repeats it immediately. Erik looks like he’s going to growl at the boy, but Olive turns from the stove.
