her bandaged arms lay carefully placed on her stomach.
Horses got sick. Horses needed to be treated. A dog could be replaced in six months; horses were expensive, horses took a long time to mature and a long time to train. Darid had a substantial collection of herbs and mixtures and potions and salves. They were meant for horses but most of the staff had never seen a magus—staff was replaceable, too—so he knew how to use them on humans.
Wherever Gavin was, he was in agony. She could feel his pain like a gauze veil as her own receded. She was surprised that he hadn’t felt her fever. But, wait: the itch in the palm of her hand wasn’t an itch. Now that the pain from the burns had ebbed, she could feel him scratching, incessantly. When Darid stepped away, she scratched back. Just once, deliberate and slow.
After a moment, Gavin sent it back to her. The itching eased.
By then, Darid was back. Holding the back of her hand, he gently pushed the sleeves of her dress up over Elly’s bandages. A few snips with a pair of brutally sharp shears and the bandages were gone. The burns were both covered with sickly gray-yellow ooze, the skin around them swollen and hot. Judah preferred their looks to the one Darid wore on his face. She remembered: on the second day after the Wilmerians’ arrival, Judah had found Darid working on one of their horses. They were shorter and sturdier than House horses, made for work and not war—but the poor mare Darid had been tending wouldn’t be doing any work anytime soon. Every rib stood out, and her legs were impossibly thin. Her mane and tail hung limp and tangled and there were oozing welts on her dirty cream-colored hide where a harness had been strapped too tightly and left too long. But her hind flanks were the worst, because the horse had been whipped, and viciously. Her dingy hide was stained with an ugly brown that could only be blood.
Normally Darid carried a lightness with him, but there had been no lightness that night. His face as he’d cleaned the little mare’s wounds, as he’d shown Judah how to coax her to eat—it was the same face she saw now. She found herself afraid. Ashamed. She didn’t want him to look at her that way.
After what seemed like an eternity, he did exactly that. “This was not an accident.”
Mutely, she shook her head.
“And even if I knew who did this to you, there’s nothing I could do about it.” He seemed to be telling himself, more than her. “If it was someone on staff, I could. But it wasn’t. Was it?”
She shook her head again.
His eyes were fixed on her arms, but for a second his pleasant stablemaster’s mask slipped and she saw the rage beneath it. Tightly bound, deeply controlled. For her. He was angry for her—not because he felt the pain she felt, or someone had judged him responsible, but at the simple fact of her suffering. She wrapped herself in that anger the way she’d wanted to wrap herself in marble, except the anger was warm and protective instead of cold and dead. It filled her with awe.
Darid’s chest swelled and his nostrils flared as he took a long breath in and let it out again. “I can heal this. Get rid of the infection. That, I can do.” He still held her hand in his. She thought she felt his fingers tighten, ever so slightly. Then he let go.
Chapter Six
In retrospect, Nate probably should have given Derie more warning. He’d been too excited, almost drunk with it, and when he saw her at the plague shrine the news exploded out of him. “I was inside,” he said, his voice high and giddy. “I saw her. She’s alive, Derie. She’s real.”
The old woman’s knuckles went white on her cane and for a moment Nate saw two Deries: the short round woman hunched in front of him, and the bonfire of Work that raged inside her. It knocked him backward as surely as if she’d put her two hands in the middle of his chest and pushed. He barely managed to keep his feet. Derie was so very powerful, and they’d been Working together since he was a child, but she’d never lost control like that before. It felt like falling off a cliff—balance gone, arms pinwheeling, brain too full of no no no to think rationally. Icy