my good arm to touch the lump, which felt hard and hot. My hand came away clean of blood. But when I tried to lift my other arm, there was a pain that didn’t limit itself to the wrist but darted through my body, and brought me to the brink of vomiting. The wrist had swollen, thickening to twice its normal width. I tried to move my fingers, but they ignored me.
“What happened?”
“It’s broken,” Piper said.
“Not that. What happened at the end of the battle?”
“We’re in New Hobart,” he said.
“Us and the Ringmaster,” said Zoe pointedly.
“We can talk about that later,” Piper said. “We need to reset the bone, straighten it before the swelling gets worse, and get it in a splint.”
“You can’t do it yourselves,” I said.
“You see any doctors around here?” Zoe waved her arm at the room around us. It was small and half in darkness. The shutter on the window had been smashed, the broken spars casting uneven lines of shadow across the floor. The door to the next room was burned away, nothing remaining but a strip of wood next to the hinges. Through the door I could see a pile of broken chairs, stacked haphazardly. I was on a bare mattress. Another mattress lay against the opposite wall, beside a jug of water.
Zoe took the edge of the sheet from the other mattress and began to rip it into strips. The noise reminded me of the tearing of arrows through the air. I tried to sit up, and the pain flooded my arm again.
Somewhere in Wyndham, or wherever he was, Zach was feeling the same pain. Once, when we were eight or nine, he’d cut his foot open on some broken glass in the river. I’d been sitting alone on the doorstep peeling parsnips when the pain came. I’d looked down at my foot. There was nothing to see: no blood, no wound, nothing at all to explain the slicing pain that had made me cry out and drop the vegetables to the ground. For a moment I’d thought I must have been bitten by a spider or a fire ant. But as I examined my intact foot, crying, I realized it must be Zach. Soon he came limping up to the house, leaving red footsteps in the dirt. His foot was opened from instep to heel, a cut so deep that it had to be stitched. I limped for days, he for weeks.
Now, as Piper whittled a chair leg into a splint, and Zoe prepared the bandages, it was comforting to know that Zach would be feeling my pain, too. Was it that I wanted him to suffer? Or because he would share my pain, understand it? Both, perhaps.
I couldn’t help but cry out when Zoe braced her foot against the table and pulled my arm straight. Piper was holding me still, and I turned my head into his neck so I didn’t have to watch what Zoe was doing. When she began, Piper’s grip tightened against me as I tried to shy away from my own arm. There was a grinding of bones.
Then it was over. Not the pain, which continued, but the dragging of bone on bone. My body slackened onto Piper’s chest. I could feel my sweat, greasing both our skin.
Zoe was busy, strapping the wooden splint tightly to my arm.
“You’ll need to keep it still, and raised if you can,” Piper said. “When Zoe broke her wrist as a kid, she made it worse by refusing to rest properly after Sally set it for her.”
“Did it keep hurting for long, after it was set?”
I’d asked Zoe, but they both answered. “Yes.”
“Done,” said Zoe, tying the bandage tightly.
Piper lowered me so that I was lying down again. He placed a folded blanket under my arm, to prop it higher. He moved me as carefully as a person carrying a butterfly in cupped hands. I thought of how his knife had been trained on me when our defeat had seemed certain. I said nothing of it to him. We both knew there was no less tenderness in that poised knife blade than there was in this holding.
“You should rest,” he said.
“Tell me what happened.”
“You saw almost all of it,” Zoe said. “The Ringmaster and his soldiers tore through the eastern gate in no time. There was some confusion, inside, from the Omegas of the town, but they worked it out soon enough. The Council soldiers fighting us were outnumbered.”