Dark Jenny

NINE

The infirmary consisted of one big room filled with cots, and a smaller room for examinations. In the glow from the windows Iris was even more breathtaking. Her black hair, deliciously tousled the previous evening, was now neatly parted and combed, and a touch of artificial color shone on her eyelids and lips. Her white coat was immaculate, and beneath it she wore a powder-blue gown. The calves revealed below the hem were certainly good medicine for me. She sat writing something on a jar’s label before she put it on a shelf. Then she turned, saw me, and smiled.

“Good morning, gentlemen,” she said as she stood. Then she spotted my hand and scowled. “Well, that tells me you didn’t follow doctor’s orders. What happened?”

“I used it to make a point. Emphatically.”

“I bet it hurt.”

“It sure got my attention.”

She smiled knowingly. It was only adorable. “You know what’s ironic? First thing this morning I saw a broken nose that had also gotten twice as bad overnight. Damnedest thing. Two self-increasing injuries in one day.”

“Something must be going around,” I agreed.

“Bob, take those manacles off. And step outside, will you?”

“I think I should stay-”

She gave him a significant look. “Bob.”

Kay sighed, unshackled me, and went back out into the hall. He closed the door, but left a small gap. “Close it all the way, Bob!” Iris called. He did.

She nodded toward the examination table. “Now hop up there, little boy. I should warn you, though, that if you’re going to keep playing so rough, I’ll have to speak to your father.”

I jumped onto the edge of the table. She lifted my hand and gingerly pushed my sleeve up my arm. When she ran her fingertips lightly over the bruise, I winced. She said, “That tough-guy veneer really is just skin-deep, isn’t it?”

“If that.”

“You can cry if you want to, I’ll never tell. Now wiggle your fingers.” I did so, and she pushed on a couple of them. “I think you did some real damage this time, soldier. You need a cast.”

As she poured fresh water into a basin and placed it on the table beside me, I said, “I noticed that the beds in the other room were all empty. How’s the girl Mary?”

“She left. Said she wanted nothing more to do with castles and knights.”

My professionalism managed to get my attention. “And you let her? She was a witness to a murder.”

She shrugged as she withdrew a roll of cloth and began cutting it into strips. “She wasn’t my prisoner.”

“Do you know where she went?”

“Back to whatever small town she was plucked from, I suppose. She’ll probably marry her childhood sweetheart and start squeezing out babies.”

I said nothing. Mary probably couldn’t tell us anything else, but then again, maybe I hadn’t asked the right questions. I wondered if Agravaine had gotten to her.

Iris said, “I heard King Marcus is here.”

“Yeah, he got in this morning. Gave me a royal command to come see you, in fact, when he saw my hand.”

She poured some white powder into the water, and it immediately turned cloudy. “That’s a relief. He’s a good man, and he’ll straighten out these metal-plated idiots before someone else gets seriously hurt.”

Since my career as a knight was aborted pretty early, I never had the luxury of fighting directly for king and country. Certainly I had never served under anyone who inspired the loyalty of Marcus Drake. My warrior years were spent as a mercenary, a sword-for-hire battling for anyone who paid me. I didn’t care who the enemy was, or why we were at war with them. During those years I killed lots of people with no more thought than I’d have swatting a fly.

And our medical facilities were nonexistent. If we got cut, we stitched each other, and if we got stabbed anywhere vital, we died. If we were too wounded to fight, we were dumped: no parades, no medal ceremonies, no bards singing of our deeds. Certainly no neat rows of beds in an airy, clean castle, or beautiful young doctors to bolster both our flesh and our spirits.

As Iris checked on the progress of the thickening liquid in the bowl, I said, “So Agravaine came to see you?”

She nodded. “He said he ran into a door going to pee in the middle of the night. I don’t think his nose will ever set right now.”

“That’s too bad.”

She smiled again. I could watch her do that all day. “Treating his injuries is always a pleasure. I look forward to his final one.”

“That’s a bit callous.”

“Doctors have to be callous. If we got emotionally involved with our patients, we’d go nuts.”

That wasn’t terribly different from the way a soldier had to think; it was one reason I was no longer a soldier. “So you never get involved with patients?”

“Never,” she said at once. She dipped one of the cloth strips in the bowl, then draped it over my knuckles. It was wet and heavy, and she immediately overlapped it with another. She pressed the dangling ends against my skin, and they stuck there. She began threading strips between my puffy fingers.

I tried not to react when it hurt, but I didn’t fool her. “Will my hand be better than his nose?”

She smiled. “Don’t worry, I’ve treated this kind of thing on the battlefield many times. You’ll be fine. And I know a neat trick.”

By now the cloth around my hand and wrist had begun to stiffen. She produced a sword hilt, the blade neatly removed, and pressed the grip into my injured palm. “Now hold this as tightly as you can while the bandages harden. That way the cast will set in the right shape. You won’t have as much wrist movement, but you also won’t drop it every time you parry a blow.”

I did as she instructed while she cleaned up the remaining cloth strips and leftover plaster. In a few minutes, she removed the hilt from my hand, and sure enough, the cast retained the shape of my grip.

“See?” She put the sword hilt back on its shelf. “You won’t win any swordsmanship awards, of course.”

“I wouldn’t on my best day.”

She handed me a black sling. “If the pain gets too much, use this to keep your hand above your heart. It might also remove the temptation to use it as a battering ram. But the more you can stand having it down, the faster it’ll heal.”

I put the sling in my pocket and hopped off the table. “Not bad. Where’d you learn to do that thing with the sword, anyway?”

“I apprenticed during the last years of King Marcus’s military campaigns, doing battlefield triage. If a soldier wasn’t dead, he needed to be able to return to the fight. I worked this out myself.”

“Was your teacher a moon priestess?”

Her eyes flashed with a surprising degree of anger. “No. Medicine is a science on Grand Bruan, not some superstitious hocus-pocus.”

In every other kingdom I’d visited, moon priestesses were respected as healers. “I’ve seen them do some pretty amazing things,” I said cautiously.

“Yeah, well, knowing you have to stop the bleeding is easy. Understanding where the blood comes from is a hell of a lot harder.”

“I’m not trying to pick a fight, you know.”

She took a deep breath, then sheepishly smiled. “Sorry. If your fingers get numb, come see me immediately. It means either your hand’s grown more swollen or the cast is too tight. Either way you could end up with gangrene.”

“Oh, I can practically guarantee I’ll need to come see you.”

She flashed those magnificent eyes at me. “You don’t give up, do you?”

“I will if you really want me to,” I said seriously. And I meant it. I gave her a moment to respond, but she let it pass. “So can I ask you something off topic?”

“Off which topic?” Her smile returned full strength.

I smiled back; heck, I grinned like the last man alive after a three-day battle. “It’s about Queen Jennifer. What kind of woman is she?”

“Out of your league, I’m afraid.”

“No, seriously. You said you’d seen her true nature, and I need some insight. This place has more secrets than flies on a manure wagon, and I don’t know who to trust.”

“You seem to trust Bob Kay.”

“Sure. He has the keys to my shackles. And I trust you.”

Her eyebrows went up. “That a fact?”

“You know it is. But after you two, I’m flapping in the breeze. Drake seems decent, but he’s thrown his lot in with Jennifer, who”-I glanced at the door to make sure no one stood waiting for the doctor and overheard me-“I definitely don’t trust.”

“Why?”

The words to tell her about the previous night left my brain, passed through my throat, and made it all the way to my teeth before I choked them back down. “Instinct,” I said instead.

“You really think she’s a poisoner?”

“It’s a woman’s way. No offense.”

“None taken. It’d be my way, too. We all use the talents we’re given.”

“And, no, I don’t think she did it. But that doesn’t automatically mean I trust her. How well do you know her?”

Iris wiped her hands with a towel. “Hm. I first met her right after I’d finished my apprenticeship. They were both really young, you know. We all were. Marcus was crowned when he was fifteen and married Jennifer when he was seventeen. And that was… wow, nearly twenty years ago.” She shook her head at the passage of so much time. “When did I get to be thirty?”

“Do you like her?”

She laughed. “Who I like is completely beside the point in this job. But between you, me, and the mice in the walls, no. Not at all. Okay, wait, that’s not entirely true. I didn’t like the snotty little girl Marcus courted. The woman she is now… she’s different. Stronger. More dedicated.”

“What changed?”

Iris shrugged. “Who knows? Back then she was a teenager. Now forty’s peeking over the horizon. People change a lot in those years.”

Again I wanted to tell her what I’d overheard the night before, but decided to hold back until I better understood the Grand Bruan dynamics. I trusted Iris, but my instincts were not infallible. “So do you think she could do what she’s accused of? Poison a knight as a warning to the others?”

Her face crinkled delightfully as she thought about it. “The spoiled girl Marc married?” she said at last. “Yes, I can believe it. But the woman she is now? No.”

“I see. Well… thanks. I have to meet with the king again, so I should probably be going.”

A touch of mischief again shone in her eyes. “I would like to check the cast before you leave to go back to wherever you came from. So we’ll see each other at least once more.”

“At least. And after that?”

“After that is after that.” She tossed the rag into a bin. “I’m a military doctor. I go where the battles are.”

I held up my bandaged hand. “I doubt I could manage a whole battle, but I could put on a hell of a skirmish.”

She laughed and shook her head. “I’d love to discuss tactics with you, but I have work to do. I will see you later, though.” And the kiss she gave me was the best promise I’d ever had.

As I wound back through the castle corridors behind Bob Kay, my wrists again secured, I scanned every hallway junction for Agravaine’s crew. They never appeared. If they weren’t hunting me, what were they doing?