He stared down at me. “Do you want to be discharged?”
“I want to be on the wall tonight.”
His eyes narrowed like he couldn’t fathom what kind of bloody creature he looked upon. “Did you really bite his cheek?”
I nodded once.
He let out a burst of air through his nose—disdain, amusement, both? He half-turned, then said, “Plug your nose, clean yourself up. You’ll go to the infirmary.”
“But—”
He started toward the door. “Be quick. I expect you on the wall before dusk.”
I marchedacross the barracks toward the infirmary. My nose was plugged with cotton, and I shivered with the dusk wind and absence of the adrenaline that had heated my veins. Ahead of me, the night guard filed out of the barracks on their walk to the wall.
The guard whose cheek I’d bitten was absent from the line. The other three I recognized at once. They wouldn’t even meet my eyes, though I tried to catch their gazes. I wanted them to know I saw them, thatI would always see them for as long as we slept in these barracks.
That was the way I’d sometimes survived in the southern district—with a wild, unbroken stare. Boys like that shriveled when you stared long enough.
Theo’s voice sounded behind me, and he broke from the line, walked alongside me. “What in Vaelen’s name, Eury?” he said, low. “You bit someone’s face?”
“I learned from the best.”
He huffed a breath. “I did that when I was eight.”
“You’ll be happy to know it was just as effective twelve years later.”
“You’re insane.”
“And alive.” I sniffed through the cotton. “You’ll be in trouble if you don’t get back in line.”
“Your nose, it’s?—”
“I know.”
He stopped, and I kept walking. “Are you in trouble?” he asked.
I’m always in some kind of trouble.“I’ll see you on the wall later,” I said over my shoulder.
“Eury,” he called out.
I stopped and glanced back.
The corner of his mouth lifted. “Your whistle’s going to sound even shittier with a broken nose.”
I couldn’t help the half-smile that curled my lip. Or the middle finger I raised.
He turned and jogged in his leathers to catch up to the line. I watched him disappear into shadow, his red hair gleaming and curly, and for a moment I saw the eight-year-old he’d been. That boy was still inside him, even if he was my senior now.
I came to the infirmary and paused at the door. My hand rose and my knuckles rapped on the wood. A woman’s grunt sounded from the other side, halfway between annoyance and encouragement.I pushed the door open, and my face was illuminated by lantern light. I squinted against it.
“Well if it isn’t Waters,” Isa the nurse said from her wide-legged seat in her armchair. “Leaking on my scrubbed floor, I see.”
I set a finger against my nostrils. “I think it’s broken.”
“I can see it’s broken.” Isa rose and hobbled over to me, her body swaying with the strange curvature of her legs. For an old woman who could barely walk, she was a marvelous medic. “What’ve you done now?”
I lifted my face as she inspected my nose. One of her hands went under my chin, then to each cheek to turn my head side to side. “Just girl stuff.”
