waking and sleeping, dreaming and thinking. Sweat plastered the light sheets to her body—light yet stifling, as though it were thick wool in the height of summer. Even had she the presence of mind to kick it off, though, as she had a time or two already, the result was just a fit of shivers instead.
The faint buzzing of Olgun's touch, the burning at the edges of the wounds, the ointments Igraine had applied after washing off the worst of the grime and gore, the unfamiliar itch of the bandages and the bed, combined in Widdershins's feverish, semiconscious mind into a skintight covering of twitching, biting, dancing ants. She moaned, absently slapping at herself, and rolled over yet again, further twisting the sheet into a veritable rope of cloth.
Voices from the next room, voices from inside her head; she found it difficult to tell, between the bouts of oppressive silence, which were which. Still, a time or two, she'd caught snippets of conversation that were, she was almost sure, passing between the priestess and their rather grudging host.
“…wasn't going to throw her out in the street in that condition,” Evrard was snarling, or so she thought. “I'm not a savage! But you need to get her the hell out of here!”
“She's in no condition to be moved!” Igraine's voice lashed back. “And even if she were, I've nowhere to take her.”
“Not my concern. Damn it, Vernadoe, you know what she did to me, to my fam—”
“Oh, don't even start. She's a thief. That's what she does. Your family hadn't even seen that stuff in years!”
“Not the point, and you—”
“And I rather clearly recall you fighting alongside her almost a year ago.”
Soft thumps suggested pacing, followed by the much louder and quite distinctive thud of fist on wall. “That was an emergency! Just because I've decided I don't necessarily want her dead doesn't mean I've forgiven her, that she has any right to ask me for any sort of aid! The bloody gall of that little…”
At this point the voices were drowned out by a semi-waking dream in which Shins could only hear the horrid laughter of that ghostly chorus that had accompanied the creature Iruoch, except this time Robin's voice sounded clearly among them. Before she could even begin to contemplate that, she was out again.
And awake once more, to the sound of heated argument. And out again. Awake to the slam of a cupboard of some sort; for no reason she could articulate, she was quite certain it was a wine closet. Then out again.
Jolted away by the staccato, percussive clatter of a fist banging on the front door. The slow, soft patter of feet creeping across the carpeted foyer.
She pushed herself up on wildly trembling arms that felt less like flesh and bone, and more along the lines of a desperate effort to support her weight on two snakes doing headstands. The muscles in her back and her stomach seemed to be trying to switch sides. Nevertheless, no matter how difficult, she was determined not to lie here helpless, to go see who had arrived and what was happening in the rest of the suite.
It was a determination she kept all the way back down to the mattress, and once more into uneasy, hallucinatory slumber.
It was the cold—gentle, soothing—that finally woke her properly, hauling her slowly but steadily through the depths of fever and pain and exhaustion. A soft, cool touch, washing away some of the sting across her skin. She felt the shimmer of Olgun's power as the god worked his own magics, adding his influence to the herbs and clean water that Widdershins knew, without checking, were contained in the soft cloths caressing her.
Sheer bliss, in that peculiar way that pain can be a relief when it replaces a greater agony; Shins almost sighed aloud.
At which point, four semi-related thoughts sprinted across her mind in quick succession, chasing one another like maniacal weasels.
Gods, that's so much better on my back than that fig-flipping blanket was, even if the smell does remind me of week-old tea! Dumb sheet felt like it was woven of hemp!
It would've been nice of everyone to keep their voices down, though. What if they'd woken me up before the balm did? I'd have felt like—
Wait, “everyone”? Why is this room suddenly so crowded?
And finally, if someone was tending to her back…
Oh, monkeys! I'm not wearing a shirt, am I?
Through sheer force of will, Shins broke through the last remaining layers of fluff