full of light. A brown blur became a wooden table, holding small blurs that sharpened into bottles and a large blur that was a pitcher and a pile of white blurs—bandages? Maybe.
She was in Elly’s room, facedown on the bed. Some of her hair was in her eyes, blood-colored streaks across her vision like bars, and when she tried to lift a hand to brush it back her hand wouldn’t come. She could lift her head, though, and did. Pain rippled down her back like burning water but she saw soft strips of cloth tied around her wrists, holding her down.
So she was tied facedown on Elly’s bed.
She took further inventory. She was naked, but covered up to her waist by a thin sheet. Her scalp itched and she could feel a thick layer of grease on her skin although the sheets she lay on were clean. There was a stale smell in the room. Her hands were sticky with old sweat. The pain in her back was constant, blazing. Her head hurt. The muscles in her neck ached. Her mouth was dry. She wished that somebody would bring her water.
Her back hurt like the burns on her arms had hurt, but worse. Had she fallen into a fire?
She had been with Darid, in the far pasture. He had pulled her boots off and she had laughed, and then he’d run his hand up the outside of her leg, fingertips barely touching the bare skin above her legging. She had teased him: Am I a horse you’re thinking of buying?
Then nothing.
Then Elly, tearstained.
Then the magus. I warned you. He had never warned her of anything. He wasn’t talking to her.
A fluttering, sick panic surged in her and she realized that she was scared. She squeezed her eyes shut and willed herself to drift away. Willed it and willed it and willed it, but when she opened her eyes there were the bottles, there was the pitcher, there were the bandages.
Her back hurt so much.
There was a new sound. The door opening; whispering footsteps coming toward her, she could not bend her head enough to see their owner. She could only lie there and wait for them to enter her field of vision.
Dark trousers, a white shirt. With a flood of relief she recognized Gavin, his shirt loose and unbuttoned, his jaw bristling with golden stubble. “You’re awake.”
Something was wrong with his voice, or possibly her ears. She licked her lips as well as she could. “What happened?”
His unshaven face twisted into a smile. There was something wrong with that, too. “Where would you like me to start?”
“I don’t remember,” she said.
An empty armchair waited next to the bed; somebody had been sitting with her. He lowered himself into it. The way he moved wasn’t right, either. He was stiff. Slow. “I was on the training field, wrestling. I got thrown; hit my head on a rock and knocked myself unconscious. You, too, apparently.”
His voice was cold. That was what was wrong with it. He sounded like Elban.
“The head stableman ran into the House carrying you in his arms. Right through the garden into the great hall, with your hair down and your feet bare.” He smiled that ghastly smile again. “We still haven’t found your boots.”
Carried her. Into the House. The panic came back, stronger than ever. “Darid.”
“Was that his name?” Icy. Freezing.
Was. “Where is he?”
“I haven’t gotten to that part yet.” Oh, he did sound like Elban, he sounded exactly like Elban. Mocking and heartless and poisonously friendly. “Don’t you want to know why your back hurts?”
Elly’s face. “No.”
“You were caned,” Gavin said. “Right here, tied to the bedposts. Half-naked, with guards watching.”
Ripping fabric. The top of her dress torn to her waist. A sea of helmets. The Seneschal, flat-eyed. Elly, crying. She did not know what she really remembered and what she could only imagine.
Gavin’s glare was hard. “I wasn’t there, of course. I was tied to the bed in the other room, much like you are now. Would you like me to take off my shirt and show you what your back looks like?”
She remembered that cold hard look. From when they were children, in the study. When they would not stop hurting her because she would not stop screaming and his face had hurt her, too: long past love, wanting only for her to shut up because he, too, was hurting. Blaming her, hating her. As he hated her now.